Part 16: Manifest Destiny

            Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said of the demon, “Why could we not cast it out?”  He said to them, “Because of your little faith.  For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”  Matthew 17:19-20

(Continued from Part 1)……Dr. Cinza Brown could barely contain his excitement after the amazing meeting with Dr. Morris Vine and his team at the Geological Survey the day before, and had spent a night of fitful sleep.  He awoke very early and reviewed his copious notes.   Thank God for Pig Lemkau and his recommendation to harvest gold on Mars, he knew nothing of Operation GERDA, yet he may have saved the United States of America from its current deep recession!

Cinza thought, how could he have been so stupid and himself not considered looking outside planet Earth for gold?  Admittedly, on first blush it sounded far fetched and stupid, but after the initial shock of the idea had worn off, the real burning question was – why the hell not? 

Why indeed forty years after America first set foot on the Moon in 1969 had we not ventured farther?  The Moon shot was accomplished using a primitive technology when compared with today’s digital world.  Back then a computer was the size of a family car and engineers still used slide rules – slide rules for Christ’s sake! 

The Wright brothers had shown in 1903 that an object heavier than air could fly and between that year and the Moon landing, only sixty-three years transpired and yet the United States achieved the miracle of putting a man on the Moon.  Now forty years later and nothing more has happened with regard to planetary exploration by humans.

Well, with the economy in a downward spiral there was now a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  It was time for the country’s leadership to get off its lazy ass and do something.  Right after the meeting concluded at the Geological Survey, and he had nonchalantly walked out during the melee, he had called Buddy people to set up a face-to-face the following morning first thing.

Buddy Peoples was an early riser and was usually one of the first people at work so Cinza hurriedly got ready, finished his coffee, and headed for the office.  There were a million things to talk about and details to be worked out prior to an audience just a few days hence with the new presidential administration, and the work being done by the Studebaker Institute was to help the United States get out of what was becoming the worst economic crisis in history, even worse than the Great Depression.

#

              For some reason, and he didn’t know why given everything else that was happening, riding on the Metro he was thinking about some of the chapters written by Sam Noble for his now seemingly abandoned book project, crude as they were.  It was the curse of Cinza’s photographic memory. 

Most disconcerting was the connection Noble wrote about, the gold veins that were found in the stone apothecary mortar carved from a meteorite that he called the Jar of Manna.  Here was yet another strange coincidence and they just kept piling up. 

After he explained to Buddy Peoples, Chairman Zack Greese, and the Studebaker Institute board of directors how they needed to convince the current presidential administration to begin a massive project to begin mining gold on Mars, somebody might make a connection to the open investigation still being conducted by Mac Kopstein.  This concerned Cinza.

If Buddy Peoples somehow recalls this minor detail about the Jar, and heaven forbid Mac Kopstein does, Noble’s life and that of this friend, the cripple Archie Jefferson, might be in jeopardy.  Cinza would try and make the case that the meteorite and gold connection never appeared in his Atlantean Geodesy paper, so Noble and Jefferson could not have known even if they had stolen the entire document instead of just the last two legible pages.

But therein lies a most peculiar paradox, by trying to show that the two thieves were innocent he may once again be incriminating himself because if not in the Atlantean Geodesy, then how could Noble know about gold and meteors?  Cinza would deny this of course saying his Geodesy was written long before his meeting with the USGS, but then that would open up another can of worms.

Then the logical next question becomes how did Noble and Pig Lemkau, the problem child over at the Geological Survey, both come to such similar conclusions – was it just coincidence, the wild imagination of two slightly loony government public servants?  Mac might even make a connection and try to convince everyone that Pig Lemkau was the mysterious handler of both Noble and Jefferson, the infamous Duke Mitchum! 

“Oh shit, this could get complicated,” he thought.  He needed to find a way to get the Studebaker Institute to conclude its investigation into Noble and Jefferson so he could finalize Operation GERDA without any cloud of suspicion hanging over him.  The last thing he needed right now were distractions, he had to concentrate on his project.  Unbeknownst to him however, the solution was already at hand.

#

                Cinza hadn’t showed up for work yet to give Buddy the good news, but already Bartholomew Peoples was having a bad day.  The appointment date set by the White House for the Studebaker Institute to get some face-to-face-time with President Hapgood and his advisors was only a week away, and if the October 1, 2009 meeting had to be postponed, it was the kiss of death for the think tank – even with Chairman Greese’s connections it would take months to get rescheduled and by then it may be too late. 

The SI might be the best and most prestigious think tank in town, but it wasn’t the only beltway bandit doing business in Washington, and everyone was lining up to pitch their ideas concerning a plan for economic recovery.  What made matters even more frustrating was that Dr. Brown still had no coherent tier-two plan for finding the gold needed for completing Operation GERDA, but he promised SI leadership he was close.

Since the early part of the twentieth-century Zack Greese had met all sitting Commanders-in-Chief except McKinley and most several times, and he had met the newest president for the first time at a social function in Washington for state governors a few years prior.  Studebaker had contributed to Buchanan “Bo” Hapgood’s presidential campaign in 2008, just like it had done for the Republican candidate, in keeping with its bi-party political philosophy of playing both ends against the middle. 

Right before Bo’s inauguration as the country’s forty-fourth President of the United States and first black president, applying another standard operating procedure, Zack the Knife personally donated a very large endowment to Hapgood’s alma mater, Vanderbilt University, earning him a seat of honor at the front table of the Inauguration Ball and meeting the president for the second time. 

He also shared that same table with the new Vice President, Wade Boatwright and the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, General Ronald Myers, both good friends he knew from prior administrations. 

                Greese and the new Commander-in-Chief chatted briefly during the gala event about his alma mater and its history, how Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt grew up poor and uneducated, but four years before dying perhaps the richest man on the planet donated $1 million in 1873 to create the magnificent Methodist university that bore his name.  Nashville on the Cumberland River was only a sleepy little town of 40,000 people back then. 

Attending its Peabody College as an undergraduate, where he took ROTC and later graduated from Vanderbilt’s prestigious law school, Bo was a passionate alumnus, wearing the same battered Commodores baseball hat during the presidential campaign that he had worn during his tour of duty as a First Infantry Division company commander during the Gulf War’s Operation Desert Storm – and earning the Medal of Honor for valor in the process. 

Prior to that he had worn that same hat when running twice for governor of the great state of Tennessee; and like most politicians, Bo was superstitious, believing having been born in Hermitage somehow destined him for the White House. 

                It was during informal chats such as these that Greese made the measure of a man, which took him mere minutes, and already knew pretty well what he needed to know about the new president – he was a brilliant, no bullshit leader and did not suffer fools lightly.  But Greese’s overriding feeling was that this was a person that once his mind was made up to take action, he did so with speed and determination. 

He knew that in today’s world, Hapgood would see the crucial need to implement his precious Operation GERDA forthwith, for the sake of the country – now all he had to do was get his staff to finalize the damn project so he could present it personally.

#

                Buddy Peoples had just come from a 7:00 am one-on-one meeting with the SI’s chairman regarding the previous day’s board meeting, and was taken to the woodshed by him yet again for still not having finalized GERDA.  “What the fuck is taking so long?” the ancient one said, very coldly and deliberately.  He also reminded Peoples to think less tactically and more strategically, like he did, about important issues. 

When Buddy reminded Chairman Greese that Dr. Brown had been in a high level meeting over at the USGS while the board meeting was going on and even called him at home afterwards, the chairman wasn’t appeased.  Greese and the other directors of the board were extremely concerned that the upcoming meeting at the White House may need postponing. 

“You got twenty-four hours to lock down our crown jewel or your ass is grass and I’m the lawnmower, capisci?” the ancient one had barked at him.  Such language used by the otherwise unemotional Greese was very unusual – the last time had been when the Archie Jefferson affair broke – and such an outburst was akin to a thousand-lash flogging for the woodshedee.  Buddy had felt physically ill when he left the boss’ dimly lit office. 

                “What the fuck does he think I am around here, just any old sack of shit!” Buddy muttered to himself still seething.  The personal admonishment made him all the more eager to meet with Cinza, who had phoned him at home yesterday saying he had completed his research at the USGS and needed to see Peoples this morning.  After he arrived at the SI, the red-eyed Cinza began explaining to his boss on how he had found the answer for his tier-two component and could now finalize Operation GERDA.  He spent a good two hours explaining using his notes everything he had learned in detail.

When the Martian option began unfolding before his eyes, Buddy’s petulant mood eventually gave way to much better spirits, and eventually to downright joyfulness.  “Holy shit!” he said, “This is unbelievable!” 

                Cinza laid everything out, just like Pig Lemkau had described and asked his boss how he thought the White House would receive the completed Operation GERDA package suggesting the United States return to the gold standard, and then having to issue an announcement almost simultaneously saying that America was sending a space expedition to Mars to begin gold harvesting operations on the Red Planet. 

                “It’s all in the way we sell our ideas to the president my boy, but in the end, he’ll have no choice because the economy is deep in the shitter,” Buddy said.  He then added, “Sure, he’ll take the entire project paper and give it to his science and economic geeks, and they’ll study it to death, but the clock’s ticking and Hapgood knows it – he’s got to come up with something bold and beautiful and it doesn’t get much better than this.  

His scientists will say there’s only at best a few grams of gold present per metric ton of Martian soil, but we’ll counter that by saying it’s about quantity, not quality, and we can just nuke out more soil for harvesting gold as we go along.  

The president’s political advisors, not the scientists, will win the day and tell him to go for it, advising him his decision will be historic and earn him a ranking as one of the greatest presidents of all time.  Greese will go ape-shit when he hears about mining gold on Mars – he loves strategic big-think projects because they earn him millions in fees.  He can then go and shove that old Armalite project up his bony ass!  And this one, hell, if we pull this off, not only will Greese be as famous as Columbus, he’ll be immortal.  They’ll name a crater or a mountain range on Mars after him.  And you and I, Cinza my boy, we’ll reap the rewards big time.”

                “But,” replied Cinza, “don’t you think the president and his advisors will need to see proof that gold does indeed exist on Mars, I mean, that’s the trigger isn’t it, actual proof that some minute amount of gold was actually discovered there?  Surely NASA will need to state publicly, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the yellow metal exists in Mars’ red soil and show proof regardless of how minute the gold sample.  Buddy, why do I get the distinct impression that this ‘small detail’ doesn’t seem to worry you a bit?  Is there something else you’d like to tell me?”

                “Cinza, in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king,” were the words spoken by the wise Buddy Peoples and then he added yet another pearl of wisdom, “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

                “Explain please.”  Cinza hated his bullshit sayings.  He was becoming more and more like Greese every day.

                “Okay, but what I’m about to tell you is completely off the record.  This is a matter of utmost national secrecy, and because it’s classified top secret at the highest level by the federal government, you and I could both be sent to jail for a very long time if this leak was ever traced back to us.  Not even Chairman Greese knows about this and you need to keep your mouth shut forevermore and keep me out of trouble.  Do you understand?” Buddy said.           

As Cinza nodded his head up and down, he had to chuckle to himself.  In the almost seven years he had been with Studebaker, Buddy had used this same ploy with him more than once and one that he  no doubt used on others in the Institute as well to bolster his self-importance.  He never quite got NSA out of his blood, all that secret agent spy crap.  He fully expected his boss to quote next the memorable words told by Tom “Maverick” Cruise to Kelly McGillis in the movie Top Gun, “That’s classified.  I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

#

                Buddy then explained to an astonished Dr. Brown, “Actually, Martian gold was indeed found on Earth way before we confirmed its existence on Mars through scientific analyzes.  You don’t really think we’ve been spending billions of dollars on sending robotic missions to Mars just to look for fucking signs of microscopic life or existence of water, I mean, who really cares about that scientific discovery bullshit anyway!  

The Commies are long gone, so their military threat is not an excuse we can use anymore, and why in the hell are the Russians, Europeans, and Japanese preparing an armada of flights to Mars over the coming years, and China is talking about a manned flight by 2025?  The reason you ask, is because they all suspect gold on Mars of course.  No one is really interested in the Moon these days.  Am I right?”  Buddy asked rhetorically then went on to tell Cinza the whole story.

                The Brits were the first ones to find it, although they didn’t know it at the time.  When Robert Falcon Scott’s frozen remains were found in November 1912 on the Ross Ice Shelf with those of his fellow adventurers in Antarctica, along with their bodies were found thirty-five pounds of rock specimens.  Even though nearly starved to death and exhausted, Scott and his ill-fated South Pole search party had refused to abandon the dead-weight load, and finally succumbed to the harsh environment eight months before their bodies were actually found by a long overdue rescue mission. 

In the ensuing hubbub of state-hero funeral for Scott, the rocks were stored in a small wooden crate, amongst many larger ones, inside the dusty basement of London’s Institute of Geologic Sciences and forgotten for years until someone decided to remove everything because of Nazi carpet bombing and later V1 rocket attacks on the city during World War II, and store the contents someplace safe for the duration of the war. 

                A museum caretaker in charge of transportation noticed that the Scott crate had mildewed severely, and that oozing from the slats was a gooey algae-like substance that smelled mildly of yeast.  The box was opened and found to be full of the green slime, so the rocks were cleaned, although the algae reappeared until strong bleach and sulfuric acid were used to clean them again. 

As one of the junior geologists scrubbed and brushed away the gunk, sun rays coming through a slit in the wooden boards covering a basement window, by chance, intersected with the rock held in his hand and a shiny glint caught his attention.  To make a long story short, after various tests it was determined that the rock was actually a meteorite fragment and the glint had been produced from tiny gold specks embedded in its surface.  All the Scott rocks had traces of gold.

                Somewhat puzzled, British scientists consulted American colleagues and actually turned over a few samples of the gold-laden meteorite fragments to them, but they did nothing with them until the late-1940s when a Swedish expedition also found similar samples in the Antarctic’s Elephant Moraine region.   The U.S. Navy’s Operation Highjump in 1947 came home from the Antarctic with gold laden samples of meteorites but this was all very hush-hush.

In 1956 the United States set up its first station off the Ross Ice Shelf and in 1957 the International Geophysical Year conference was held, divvying up the continent between twelve countries for the sake of preservation, science, and humanity. 

By then there were murmurs of some strange meteorite discoveries, but the talk of gold was quickly dismissed by Americans and Brits as urban legend nonsense, rumors not uncommon during the long winters in the region when cabin fever sets in.  America’s spin control was very effective.  When the Soviets launched Sputnik, a small, very elite group of American scientists with top-secret clearance expressed fear too, but not because of military application. 

They were concerned that the Communists had their sights set on the Moon, where, they speculated, the Soviets thought rock and metal fragments laced with gold found at Tunguska originated from.  Luckily for us, the Kremlin thought their own scientists were crazy and dismissed the theories, saying that the Siberian region already had large quantities of local gold for mining and no one could prove the fragments taken from Tunguska came from space.  The Red leadership focused on using space to gain military advantage over the Americans, but nevertheless rumors lingered in the Soviet scientific community.

#

                Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 crew returned from their historic Moon voyage with almost fifty pounds of rocks in 1969, the same year Japanese geologists in the Antarctic stumbled onto a huge meteorite field, and since that year no place on Earth has produced more samples of cosmic rocks fallen from the heavens. 

Also that same year, American geologists looking at the newly arrived Moon rock specimens noticed peculiar looking, yellow-colored grains and veins covering some of the rocks, which were promptly confiscated by vigilant supervisors cautioning possible bacterial contamination.  Those speckled samples were never seen again, and a series of similar actions may account for the 100 pounds of Moon rocks that have “disappeared” from the 842 pounds brought back through the last Apollo flight in 1972.

                “Hold on,” Cinza gasped, “that was the year Dr. Lemkau, you know, the fat guy over at USGS who gave me the whole idea about gold on Mars, started at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  You think there’s a connection?”

                “Could be.  It was also the Pasadena guys who sent robotic missions to Mars, and even though NSA tried to censor all the scientific information being sent back from soil samples, there was a lot of data traffic and it’s possible we missed something.  I’ll get Kopstein to run a check, discretely.  It might also be a good idea to check the backgrounds of the other guys at your meeting, like that guy Vine, him being a Brit and all.”  Say what you wanted about Buddy, but he was thorough when it came to security matters.

                “So then what happened?” Cinza queried.

                “We figured it out.  The Moon rocks with the gold specks didn’t originate on the Moon, and neither did the meteorite samples found by Scott originate from deep outer space as first thought.  The Scott meteorite samples found in Antarctica and the ones found on the Moon contained vesicles, or tiny pockets containing air, very much like the air studied and measured in Martian soil scooped up by the Viking Lander spacecraft in 1976 – with gas molecules chemically identical to the ones found in the thin Martian atmosphere.

Some large asteroid or asteroids had impacted with Mars eons ago and knocked loose part of the planet, throwing meteors into space, some reaching the Moon, some reaching Earth and God knows where else.  

If that evidence wasn’t conclusive enough, the mineral grain ‘fingerprints’ found in Martian rocks recovered by the Lander’s robot were identical to the Martian samples found in Antarctica and on the Moon – to which our scientists concluded within a 99.9-percent chance of probability that gold actually existed on Mars.  We were also able to obtain a few samples of comet debris with gold specks from the Tunguska field after the fall of the Soviet Union, when things there were rather chaotic.

Same thing, same vesicles and same mineral fingerprints in the Russian samples as those meteorite samples found in Antarctica and the Moon.  That same year NASA launched ANSMET – Antarctic Search for Meteorites – a little known project sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey and funded by them every year since, to recover meteorite fragments from Antarctica and map the locations; only they didn’t get to keep the samples – my old outfit at NSA made sure all the specimens have been stored safely and are accounted for. 

So far, almost 60,000 meteorite specimens have been recovered from all over that God-forsaken place under ANSMET and some have in fact showed signs of pure gold present.”

                “Unfucking believable!” was all Cinza could say.  “Not even those pain-in-the-ass bloggers had a clue, and my handler at the Geological Survey Dr. Morris Vine didn’t mention a single word to me about ANSMET.  So why haven’t we done something about it, I mean, why haven’t we already starting harvesting gold on Mars if we knew it was there, or at least made the discovery aware to the general public and asked the private sector to get involved?

                “For a guy with a genius IQ and two Ph.D.’s you’re not too fucking bright Cinza, think about it?  The last thing we needed was for the world community to demand some sort of wealth-sharing proposition; we the United States do all the heavy lifting and then we’re supposed to share what gold we find with the have-not third world countries looking for welfare checks and free handouts.  Fuck ‘em. 

Imagine the mess if we divided Mars up like the scientific community of advanced nations did with Antarctica back in 1957 and all those do-gooders and environmentalist tree-huggers made it impossible for us to mine gold ore or perform high ordnance extraction on the scale this guy Pig Lemkau is talking about. 

The hue and cry from world public opinion and the assholes over at the United Nations would be so loud our grandiose plans for gold harvesting would simply implode from bullshit bureaucracy and politics.  As far as your handler not telling you about what ANSMET found, I doubt if he even knew – this was very top-secret stuff and only a few need-to-know people over at Geological Survey had access to this information.”

#

                Buddy continued his explanation.  “Then you have to put this whole thing into the context of the historical, political, and cultural setting or our own country during various periods.  Think about it.  Announcing to the public in the late 1950s that gold-laden meteorites had been found in the Antarctic would have started a goldrush so severe that its pristine environment would have been devastated, not to mention the havoc such an announcement would have had on the price of gold and world financial markets.  And to what end?

We still had no technological edge over the Soviets at the time; hell, they had just launched Sputnik for Christ’s sake.  Then there was the Bay of Pigs, the October 1962 missile crisis with the Russians over Cuba, Kennedy’s assassination, and then LBJ’s guns and butter politics – him creating massive social programs at home and at the same time spending billions on the war in Vietnam.  Do you think the American public would really care about space rocks laced with gold after hearing every night on the six o’clock news how many of our boys died that day in Nam?”

                “Buddy, calm down; you’re preaching to the converted.  I did my college graduate paper on the economic turmoil the country entered, precisely in late 1963, after the Kennedy assassination and beginning with the Johnson administration – a period of deficit spending and fiscal irresponsibility that has continued to this day.  The irony of it is that the one thing that may bail us out of the mess we’re in now is the thing that has been kept secret from the American people for so long.”  Buddy heard Cinza’s words but wasn’t listening very well, and was getting slightly agitated.

                “Well, you asked me why we never made space gold public knowledge and I’m answering your question. 

Nixon did a good job with the economy, took us off the international gold reserve, but Watergate wrecked his legacy; Carter’s administration was a basket case of high interest rates, sky-high inflation, and the Iranian hostage nightmare; then came Reaganomics when Dutch almost bankrupt our country while finishing off the Soviet Union; Bush 41 just continued spending money like Reagan had; then came the economic boom years of Clinton, followed by the NASDAQ bubble bursting, the Monica Lewinsky affair, and his impeachment; and then came two terms of Bush 43, who did a great job after 9/11 protecting us, but spent the country so far into a hole that it’s now bankrupt. 

Then there were the Arab-Israeli conflicts over the years, the Gulf Wars, the many oil crises, and one domestic or international terrorism problem after another that just seemed to postpone any rational reason for telling the American public about finding gold on Mars.  Then just consider the domestic political fallout from religious groups pressuring us not to change the cosmic order of things. 

The powerful Christian right coalition in the U.S. would have had the president’s head on a platter for disturbing God’s cosmic order, so the fear of negative political fallout was an important consideration. 

And if all that wasn’t enough, since the Vietnam War the liberal media in America thinks our military and political leadership are all thieves; just look at the stink the liberals made over the Abu Ghraib fiasco a few years ago.  Yet at the same time, they said very little about the brutality and horror over the beheadings of Westerners in Iraq, videotaped by terrorists and shown around the world on television.” 

#

                Cinza had obviously hit a sensitive nerve with Buddy, who had worked in government during the eighties and nineties at NSA, and who to this day was very resentful about unfair media reporting.  He also figured it probably wasn’t the best time to ask Buddy why he hadn’t told him about gold on Mars in the first place but at this point it was moot anyway.  Cinza decided to try a different approach.

“Well Buddy, what’s done is done but now the jig is up.  In just a few days the Studebaker Institute will be making to the President of the United States a sales pitch, which has at its foundation explaining to the American people that its government will need to spend billions of dollars in the coming years and decades to mine gold from the depths of Mars’ red soil as the only remedy for saving our economy, and pretty much the economies of the rest of the free world. 

To say the scrutiny regarding our scientific evidence will be severe is putting it mildly, and the harshest of all the critics will be the American liberal press, so we can’t afford any fuck ups. 

Sure, they’ll rant and rave about keeping the facts secret for so long like they always do, but the federal government can concoct some wild cover story about having to keep the information under wraps due to national security, fear of a viral bacterial infection from outer space, or whatever; and after heated televised Congressional inquiries into the subject for a few weeks the matter will die away. 

Especially if in the short run we see results forthcoming that stabilizes the economy and implementing a project that pays its own way for Mars exploitation.  It’s not like the general public hasn’t been lied to in the past by the federal government, is it?”  Cinza snickered.

Then he followed up by asking Buddy a serious question, “How many Martian rocks do we have showing traces of gold anyway, and how much gold weight all-in are we talking about – a gram, an ounce, a pound, a kilogram, how much?”

“Well,” Buddy replied, “not many really.  Between the few fragments recovered on the Moon, the couple from Tunguska, the Scott meteorite fragments, and the rest we found in Antarctica, we’re talking maybe a few hundred confirmed Martian rocks with gold traces.  All in, I would say that the total gold content weighs about two grams which if molded into a sphere, would be about the size of a pea.”

Cinza had to take a deep breath and pause for a moment to gather his composure before continuing.  He said reverently, “That quantity will suffice quite nicely, Buddy.”   

“Holy shit!” Cinza thought to himself, “This is a miracle.”  Now all he had was one more hurdle to get over and that was how to get rid of the Noble and Jefferson investigation. 

#

After regaining his composure somewhat, he next said to Buddy, “One thing still bothering me, though, is this guy Archie Jefferson and his pal Sam Noble.  We have not received any new material from Noble in months, and after a thorough investigation by Mac Kopstein and his pals at the FBI they have not uncovered anything having to do with Noble on any involvement whatsoever in the affair.  It was Jefferson who stole the documents and not Noble.

And Mac Kopstein used all his connections at the Federal Bureau of Investigation to look into the background of Noble’s army buddies he has associated with over the years, especially those guys at the big army reunion in Rosslyn last year and still Mac came up with nothing.  Same thing with regard to the turncoat Howard Edwards back in the day, nothing.

We are only speculating Noble was involved in Jefferson’s document theft somehow due to the similarities in some of the things he wrote about in his ‘book’ that were coincidentally mentioned in my ‘Atlantean Geodesy,’ but quite frankly I’m prepared to put this matter behind us and get on with finalizing Operation GERDA.” 

“Not buying it Dr. Brown, sorry.  How the hell did Noble concoct the story in his book about all that Holy Grail bullshit and it being made from a meteorite with gold veins?” asked Buddy.

“It wasn’t the Holy Grail, remember, it was the Jar of Manna.  There never was a Holy Grail – Noble called it a confabulation of stories, none based on hard facts or authentic Biblical references.  And none of that appeared anywhere in the 'Atlantean Geodesy' anyway, let alone in the last two legible pages,” responded Cinza, afraid now that Noble, and possibly he, were in deep trouble. 

Actually, Cinza had indeed mentioned very briefly in passing the Holy Grail but way before the final two pages.  There was never any mention of gold meteorite fragments in his paper, and was hoping Buddy would just let everything go. 

Buddy then asked, “Aren’t you the least bit curious on how Noble happened to touch on so many topics in his crappy manuscript that you mentioned in your ‘Atlantean Geodesy,’ at least from an intellectual point of view?”  Cinza sensed intuitively at that moment he was being set up for something but nevertheless could only respond by saying, “Of course I am.”  This wasn’t all bullshit though, Cinza was dying to find out where Noble got those bowtie shaped clamps he had seen in the color photos taken at his house.

After a pause, the sly dog Buddy Peoples said, “Well, if you’re so curious to find out where Noble got his ideas from, why not ask him personally?”  A quizzical look appeared on Cinza’s face and he replied, “What do you mean?”  Buddy Peoples filled Dr. R. Cinza Brown in on new developments.

#

Buddy told Dr. Brown that at yesterday’s Studebaker board meeting, while Cinza was entangled with the boys over at the Geological Survey, Greese and the directors had decided it was time to take action regarding the Sam Noble and Archie Jefferson incident of the previous year.  They felt it was time to conclude Kopstein’s investigation, much to his consternation.  Mac was at the meeting.  Being a good soldier, Mac Kopstein obeyed Chairman Greese’s marching orders because he had no choice. 

What with all the government business coming their way, the last thing they needed was a lawsuit from a handicapped black man who also happened to be a decorated Vietnam hero and perhaps just stumbled across a few documents labeled “U.S. Government Classified” by accident.  As Buddy went on to explain in detail that Mac tried to protest by saying they had Jefferson dead to rights but Greese laid down the hammer and told him to just follow orders and “take action.”

Kopstein and FBI agents then cornered Archie Jefferson following the board meeting and made him a deal he couldn’t refuse.  Koptstein told him, “Look Jefferson, I bust old bullshitters and I bust bold bullshitters, and now I busted me an old bold bullshitter, so come clean, how did you steal these documents from the photocopier room?”  And with that Mac had showed Jefferson the actual shredded documents he had torn up and thrown away. 

Mac applied intense pressure regarding the photocopied-page thefts of the “Atlantean Geodesy” that were traced by the FBI directly back to him, even had his DNA on them, so when convicted in federal court which most assuredly he would be, Jefferson would receive a sentence of ten years in jail and a $500,000 fine. 

This meant that Archie was pretty well fucked because he’d be almost seventy-five-years-old when he got out of jail, if the paraplegic, wheelchair-bound veteran lived that long.  At first Kopstein wasn’t sure what “take action” meant, but then realized it wasn’t about calling in the CIA cleaner team from Panama to murder Jefferson and Noble; it just meant make a financial deal with Jefferson and flip him.

After much hemming and hawing, Jefferson finally confessed to taking the three pages, only two of which were legible, and passed an impromptu FBI polygraph test confirming his story.  The FBI concluded he had not shown them to anyone else and then he ripped them up and carelessly tossed the shreds in the Studebaker cafeteria waste bin. 

They believed Jefferson when he insisted he had never shown the two legible pages to his friend Noble but only shared one item of content with him verbally, in passing, by suggesting he write about gold, nothing more. 

When asked how he obtained the documents in the first place, Jefferson confessed that he had lifted them off the old fashioned analog photocopier imaging drum that unbeknownst to most people always left a shadow of at least the last two or three copies, which remained in place until new copies were made.  When pressed further, he explained in technical detail how it was done, and the explanation held together according to an FBI technical expert.

But still Kopstein pressed Jefferson and told him he was still lying and that somehow he had gotten his hands on the entire “Atlantean Geodesy.”   Hell, a blind man could read Noble’s manuscript and figure it out.  This was the ruse used by Kopstein to finally flip Jefferson who by then was shitting bullets.

Besides agreeing not to press charges against Jefferson for the theft of the documents, to sweeten the pot further Chairman Greese told Kopstein to offer Jefferson a bump in pay, an annual bonus going forward, and other perks for his remaining years at Studebaker if he did them a special service.  

Jefferson was to arrange a meeting with Sam Noble and a “book publisher” to buy the rights of his yet unpublished manuscript, the very same manuscript Kopstein had once called a terrorist manifesto.  Do this and the slate was wiped clean, not do this and he was going to jail for a long time, Archie was told.  Grudgingly, Jefferson agreed to the terms. 

#

Zack Greese, clever bastard that he was, wanted to tie up any loose ends and buy any and all legal rights to Noble’s “book” so none of it would ever see the light of day, be published, or fall into unfriendly hands.  Since the book was unpolished and unfinished anyway, Greese authorized Kopstein to get Jefferson to tell Noble that a “publisher” client of the Studebaker Institute, where he worked, was “perhaps” interested in paying $30,000 for publishing rights based on the chapters Jefferson received from Noble and had showed the book publisher.  Greese figured this was a fair price.  After all, Judas only got thirty pieces of silver for ratting out Jesus. 

Jefferson was to figure out any details and improvise as he went along, but he had to make clear that Noble would have to meet personally with the “publisher” and sign some documents to finalize the deal if he wanted the money. 

If Noble got pissed that Jefferson showed the so-called “publisher” his manuscript without telling him, Jefferson was told just to play along and pretend he didn’t know any better; after all, they were good friends and he was just trying to help. 

Also in on the scam was Noble’s boss’ boss, the dimwit Larry Atwood over at State, who was to continue monitoring Noble’s behavior at work and make sure that Sam Noble did not stay in government service one day past his sixty-fifth birthday of June 6, 2010, the mandatory retirement age at the State Department.  The plan was to get Noble and his wife out of the country as soon as possible so they could retire to Brazil’s outback wilderness and hopefully never be seen or heard from again.  Noble’s immediate supervisor, Kurt Rowan, had no idea what was going on.

#

“You be the ‘publisher’ and meet with Sam Noble,” Buddy now told Cinza after filling him in, “and see what intelligence you can worm out of him.  Your objective is to get him to sign a legal document, let’s call it a non-disclosure agreement, giving your ‘company’ all exclusive rights to his book and any and all copies. 

You can tell him you already have the manuscript he sent over to his pal Archie Jefferson, and just need his original drafts plus any new material if there is any.  Furthermore he’ll have to keep his mouth shut and not discuss the NDA with anyone, ever.  He’s retiring in a few months anyway so that will not seem like an unreasonable request. 

We think he’ll grab the money like fish to bait because Noble has very little in the way of savings, and his small government pension and Social Security check is all the income he will have when he retires next year.”  Thanks to the FBI and the Patriot Act, the SI knew every financial detail of Sam Noble’s life and that of his wife, Nellie.

“I don’t know Buddy, this is something a little outside my job description, I’m not sure if this is even legal,” and with that Cinza gave his boss a worried look.

“Balderdash Brown, if you ever want my job you’ll need field experience so grow some cojones and take this one for the team.”  Cinza trusted Buddy Peoples about as far as he could throw Pig Lemkau and he doubted very much he could even pick up that fat bastard. 

Buddy continued, “Anyway, we got the best New York Jew law firm in the world on twenty-four-hour retainer to help you, just in case, so don’t sweat it.  They will also help with a fake name for the ‘publisher’ and the money details for payment to Noble of the $30,000.”

            “All right,” Cinza said rather feebly, “I’ll go along with the charade.”

“Attaboy!  Just two more things, Brown,” his boss said.  Say what you wanted about Buddy Peoples, but most of the time he was one sharp dude.  “You said that Dr. Lemkau over at the Geological Survey had brought up a very good point, and that being how NASA, once the gold was mined on a grand scale and turned into bullion on Mars, intended to get the metal back to Earth.  It seems to me this brings up a crucial issue – the problem of immense dead weight and the cost-effectiveness of sending thousands of tons of gold bullion 35 million miles back to Earth.  Your thoughts please?”  

“Actually, the solution came to me after my meeting yesterday and I thought more about it this morning when I was coming in on the Green Line.  I think the simplest possible solution is not to bring gold back from Mars at all, I mean, in great quantity anyway.”  Buddy, ever the tactician, needed further enlightenment and asked Dr. Brown to elaborate.

“Think about it Buddy, what do we do with the gold we dig from the ground here on Earth?  We chemically process it into bullion and any gold not used by industry, defense, or jewelry is converted into monetary bullion reserves. 

Other countries do the same thing.  And what do their governments do with the gold bullion extracted from ore harvested underground?  Why, they just turn around and store it right back underground in steel vaults, that’s what.  And when the U.S. Treasury, or IMF, or some other central bank somewhere wants to transfer gold between themselves, all they do is make the transfer electronically via computers. 

Gold is never physically transferred out of its home vault because of weight, logistics, and security reasons.  After all, in today’s virtual world it’s the illusion of gold that’s important and not the tangible metal.”

“So you’re saying just leave the goddamn gold bullion there on Mars,” Buddy said, “where it’s processed into bullion in the first place, and use its intrinsic value back here on Earth for monetary transactions?  I like it, the idea has a beautiful simplicity to it, sort of poetically sublime.”

“Not all the gold,” responded Cinza to Buddy’s observation, “small quantities we’ll bring back to Earth to wow the public and press.  The fact that it’s Martian gold may even make it worth more than the market price of a troy ounce of gold mined on Earth due to its extra-terrestrial nature and value as a collector’s item. 

We will, however, have to provide proof that our sovereign gold stock exists as bullion on Mars so we will need to get UN astronaut inspectors involved for verification purposes.  But you said you had two things, Buddy.  What’s the second?”

“Oh yes, almost forgot, you know, the usual project bullshit at the Studebaker Institute.  Chairman Greese and the other board directors will need to know the risk assessment for Operation GERDA.  This is routine boilerplate shit and you’ll have to write it up, but what do you see as the single greatest risk to GERDA’s success?” 

#

Every project produced at SI had to have, as standard operating procedure, a risk assessment analysis.  Since the vast majority of undertakings by the Institute already had preordained success thanks to the greasing of palms and making the project known ahead of time to men in the right places in government, the risk assessment had become somewhat of an academic process, an anachronism from the old days. 

Cinza had to admit there were many, many risks coupled with such a massive project undertaking.  Like the reaction of world leadership and international financial markets when the U.S. announced its decision to return to a gold standard, but with America already accounting for one-fourth of the world’s total economic output, they would have no choice but to fall in line. 

The biggest risk, he had feared, was not finding gold on Mars at all, something he no longer worried about after hearing from Buddy and the gold samples in NASA’s possession.  He was now absolutely sold on the fact that there was gold on Mars and in large quantities, only not densely concentrated. 

A lot of dirt and rocks will have to be moved around.  So that left the family of technological problems to deal with – rocketry, possible bacterial life on Mars, survival logistics, harvesting gold-laden soil with nukes, deadly lethal environment, chemical processing – and millions of accompanying little details, and Cinza explained these concerns to his boss.  He was sure, however, given time, money, and highly trained people, all these problems could be overcome with minimal loss of human life. 

“Well one minor item does come to mind Buddy,” Cinza said, “and that’s how the public writ large and members of Congress will react to us using thermonuclear weapons on Mars.”  After a moment, Buddy responded by saying, “that won’t be a problem, it’s about spin control and branding.  We won’t call them thermonuclear weapons - we’ll call them ‘freedom firecrackers!’”

Cinza paused for a moment after Buddy’s comment and thought to himself, “Seriously?”  After a moment he spoke up and said he did have one more major concern of a possible serious risk he felt could sidetrack Operation GERDA, and cause Hapgood’s administration severe heartburn later on should they decide to run with GERDA. 

“I guess if I had to pick the most worrisome scenario and biggest risk, the one thing that none of us would want to see happen after President Hapgood implements GERDA, it would be that some tinhorn dictator somewhere, or some archaeologist finds a horde of lost gold from antiquity, or some lucky-assed prospector stumbles upon a gold-find of biblical proportions, the mother lode of all mother lodes, close to the Earth’s surface. 

But even then, it would have to be a mountain of gold, thousands and thousands of tons of the stuff, to make GERDA economically unviable and create catastrophic turmoil in financial market worldwide.  The news of such a mammoth gold find would create an existential threat to the United States of America almost immediately upon being made public. 

Quite frankly, with all my investigations into above and below ground gold supplies throughout the world, I don’t see how it could happen, seems impossible – but you never know, there’s always the wild card factor.”

“Well,” said Buddy, “We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.  I’m afraid that’s a risk we’re all just going to have to take.”

#

The Studebaker Institute was a flurry of activity for the next few days as the entire organization geared up for what was to be perhaps the most important new-business project pitch in the almost sixty odd years of its existence, bigger even than Armalite; so much so that the chairman of the institute was involved in the details of Operation GERDA, a very rare occurrence indeed.  Zack Greese insisted that Cinza include and prominently display in his presentation that returning to a gold standard is supported by the U.S. Constitution and that economic problems of today are a direct consequence of the failure of the Supreme Court to uphold the monetary provisions of Article 1, Section 10.

The first draft of the project paper was a massive two-volume set of documents, with half the second volume devoted to tables of econometric modeling showing the macro and micro economic impact of the United States returning to a gold standard, and the other half devoted to Mars exploration and exploitation charts, diagrams, and cost-benefit analyzes for open-pit deep mining its gold-laden ore with freedom firecrackers.  Digital files were also developed. 

Trying to pare the whole damn thing down into a compact yet cogent PowerPoint presentation for the President of the United States, and to who knows how many of the Commander-in-Chief’s staff, was not going to be easy; Cinza was putting in very long hours at the office.  As he worked, he drifted off from time to time in dreamy fantasies, imagining himself standing in the Oval Office, with laser pointer in hand making some important point that the president loved and gave him kudos for. 

Or that the meeting was held in some other location, like Camp David, with the Council of Economic Advisors present as well as military brass, and various secretaries of the cabinet, and in the end, he would be celebrated for his Operation GERDA – Gold Extraction and Relocation for Defense of America - and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom!  

#

His dreams of glory came crashing down a couple of days prior to the big show, when Buddy Peoples explained to Cinza the finalized White House meeting’s agenda and venue.  For some reason, Cinza had always assumed that he would be making the presentation; after all, he spent months and months working on GERDA going all the way back to 2007, he was its father, so it only stood to reason that he would be the one from the Studebaker Institute to sell the idea to President Hapgood and his people. 

Sure, the chairman and executive director would be there to lend moral support, but the dog and pony show was his and his alone – it was only logical and fair. 

When Cinza was called by Buddy’s secretary to come to the executive director’s office, he had a bad feeling something was going to happen even before his boss spoke up.  “Cinza, I know you’ve been working your ass off to present GERDA to the president but I’m afraid there’s been a change of plans.  You won’t be making the presentation after all, as a matter of fact, there won’t be any presentation.” 

A crestfallen Dr. Brown could only reply, “Ah shit!”

“Relax, the meeting is still on for October 1st.  It’s going to be held in the president’s private office, not the Oval, and it’s just going to be a one-on-one with President Hapgood and Chairman Greese with no one else present.  This is how deals are cut in this town kiddo.  It’s not like in the movies or on television, with good-looking actors pretending to be important people, memorizing make-believe lines from a bullshit script written by a team of Ivy League English majors, full of barbs, witticisms, clichés, and phony pearls of wisdom. 

The really big deals in this town are done behind closed doors, the fewer the people inside the room the better, and never, and I mean never are there minutes recorded, or notes or pictures taken.  Subtlety and secrecy are the embodiment of raw power in the American Republic.

Look Cinza, the top dogs make deals with a look, a nod, a handshake, and a whisper, and that’s all.  The other bullshit with bells and whistles will come into play later, with you, me, the Studebaker directors and Greese going over to the Oval Office to sign the consulting contracts and have our pictures taken with the president. 

You should take all this as a compliment, I mean, the higher the importance of Studebaker’s projects and the bigger the bucks involved, the more Chairman Greese likes to get hands-on. 

But you need to get the project paper finalized as soon as possible, because after the big guys’ meeting, we’ll have to deliver it to the White House Chief of Staff for further scrutiny by him and the rest of the presidential sycophants.  Dr. Brown, I hope you can keep all this in the proper positive perspective.  President Hapgood has his hands full with yet another car bombing in Jerusalem and the U.S. State Department has issued a travel advisory for American citizens to leave Israel.  We’re lucky to have his attention at all.” 

Buddy’s words weren’t much solace, but the more Cinza thought about the more informal approach given current events, the more it made sense, so he hunkered down and placed the last finishing touches on his masterpiece.  He thought his head was going to explode from these past few days of utterly intense pressure!

(This is a work of fiction.  Although some real-world names, organizations, historical settings, and situations are used to enhance the authenticity of the story, any similarities to actual persons, organizations, or situations are coincidental and all portrayals are purely the product of the author’s imagination.  This is the second edition abridged version 2019.  First edition Copyright © 2006.  All rights reserved)