Nexus - 0221 - New Times Magazine-pages

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her task was to return to Calcutta and wait until the twenty-first of conditioned with scrupulous attention to detail, There was a good the month. If his mission was successful, Mike-Alpha-Delta-3 chance of his surviving the London operation and being used would arrive back in India that day and Julia would start the again later. Special operations’ accelerated-learning visual input process of deleting all traces of his operational memory. Once was arranged in modules, each covering a single subject. It was more using ELF electromagnetic fields, she would selectively critical that Otto have at least a basic knowledge of each subject in erase each and every aspect of his mission until all that was left case a ‘flashback’ occurred. That way he would tend to associate would be a 41- year-old oilman called Otto Jewell, slightly disori- any sudden memory recovery with earlier real-life events, After entated and very tired but completely unaware of his activities hours of questioning under hypnosis, Nobel ordered the two 'mar- during the preceding two weeks. Otto would believe the entire _itime’ modules excluded because Otto had no prior knowledge at period had been spent on oilfield duties in Calcutta. all of diving or seabome operations. If the mission went badly wrong and Otto were taken alive or Visual input in Morocco had started with Otto's brain activity killed by the British police or intelligence services, special opera- under constant scrutiny as the accelerated learning process began. tions would take swift action to cover up all traces of any involve- The procedure started quite slowly, but as the Alpha fields and ment. Dead or alive, Otto's 'real' life history would be discreetly direct visual-input projection forcibly punched new neural path- leaked on the American news wires. Back in 1980, Otto had spent ways through his brain, a strange thing happened: Otto's brain an entirely innocent month in Libya's Sarir oilfields sorting out ‘learned how to learn’. His Critical Flicker Fusion frequency, a problems for oil company AGECO, but that was not the story the measure of the brain's ability to discriminate between massed'data world media would be provided with. Instead, the discreet leak on inputs, increased dramatically while his reaction times halved. the American news wires would state intelligence sources con- Julia watched her big colour monitor and listened to her head- firmed Otto had attended a Libyan "terrorist taining camp" near _ phones with interest as the first module, an operational conversion the Chad border in 1980, and that he had flown to and from Libya __to the Northrop F5, was slowly fed to Otto. By the time the last on British Caledonian Airways out of Gatwick. With the media module on rifles and ballistics was run on day four, Julia could no pack baying at its doors, British Caledonian would confirm Otto's longer do so. The screen was a blur, and the noise in her head- outward and inward flights and the story phones a continual high-pitched shriek. would be sei in stone, For ever after- Otto seemed unperturbed as he lay motion- wards, Otto Jewell would be known to the - = less on the white operating table, immo- public only as a hired mercenary on the .» julia sensed a bilised eyelids open and pupils dilated while payroll of none other than Colonel 5; B i his brain absorbed new data at the equiva- Muammar Al Qadhafi of Libya. breakthrough: she had lent of ten sheets of close-typed A4 paper There was no chance of Otto breaking roken the jelly-mould of per second. down under interrogation. If captured 1 ree Bey reas Indoctrination was more critical. As each alive, he had been programmed to revert Otto's basic personality into day passed, Otto was reinforced in the belief to his normal age of 41 years immediate- i nt pi that he was a patriotic member of US ly. The hock of finding bingelf oe Et Soncinl Opera di y. severe shock of finding himse! ‘Ty . pecial Operations: a proud lieutenant under police interrogation in London and set about rebuilding it colonel in a covert force formed from the = _ — ye 7 Lary to special operations dk 7 — of communists and mig enough to induce a heart attack. ; Siete errorists by whatever means necessary. Even if Otto survived the shock and was specifications. Time and time again he was reminded 4 subjected to forensic hypnosis and drug- small number of innocent people had to die, assisted interrogation using SOdiU! ff - TU_T_a_aa————<—— byt that their deaths were necessary to pro- tathol, the worst that could happen would be the discovery of the _ tect true democracy for the world as a whole. Nobel worried con- ‘decoy’ hypnotic level carefully developed in Calcutta. The rela- _tinually about this single aspect of Otto's personality: as an tively shallow decoy hypnotic level revolved around drilling oper- Englishman from a family proud of its three hundred years’ mili- ations and had absolutely nothing to do with missions in the West _tary service to Crown and country, Otto had an extremely high End of London. Special operations had covered every angle. sense of honour. He adhered to a strict code of conduct where Julia finished packing and phoned for an airman to take her bags © women and children were regarded as non-combatants, and where to the waiting Gulfstream II executive jet. It was time tobe onher _ the Geneva Convention demanded prisoners be treated with digni- way, and she was looking forward to a long bath and a five-star ty. Such outmoded principles were counter-productive to special meal at the Oberoi Grand Hotel. After the airman loaded her bags, operations work, so Gordon Nobel ordered Julia to break Otto Julia Long sat back comfortably in a VIP seat, then reached across _ completely. to the cocktail cabinet and poured herself a stiff drink. She sipped Slowly but surely, the obscene special operations doctrine took it slowly as the Gulfstream roared off the ranway, turning to the _ hold under the intense pressure of electromagnetic stimulation and north-east on the first stage of a dog-leg course that would take the visual input. Quite suddenly early on day three, Julia sensed a aircraft to its first refuelling stop at Cairo, while allowing it to stay breakthrough: she had broken the jelly-mould of Otto's basic per- well clear of Algerian and then Libyan airspace over the Gulf of sonality into a thousand different pieces, and set about rebuilding Sidra. Leaning back in her seat, Julia opened her MKMAD folder _it to special operations specifications. Such was the awesome and extracted Otto's slim file. MKMAD was a notorious ‘special power of the techniques used, that by the morning of day four the access’ sub-project originally run under a different acronym in par- job was complete. Otto would now ignore his hereditary honour allel with Artichoke, a mind-control project from the ‘fifties long and training, and kill on command without a shred of remorse. believed extinct by senators and congressmen alike. Julia smiled Indeed, Otto would shoot an American president without question, with amusement. Politicians were told only what they needed to _ but only if US Special Operations ordered him to do so. On that know. fateful day in April 1984, Julia Long permanently destroyed a part Gordon Nobel had been adamant that Mike-Alpha-Delta-3 be — of Otto Jewell’s soul. NEXUS 25 AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 1994