several universities. Something to do with microwaves or some such.
Sounded like a snorer to him.
'Show him in.'
The man who followed Michaels's secretary into the office was tall,
thin, nearly bald, and looked to be about fifty. He wore a plain black
business suit and a dark tie, and carried a battered aluminum
briefcase. He could have passed for a professor just about anywhere.
'Dr. Morrison. I'm Alex Michaels.'
'Commander. I didn't expect to be meeting with the head of the
organization.'
Michaels considered telling him that his assistant had quit and that
his best computer guy was tromping around in the woods somewhere with
his new girlfriend, but E
decided it wasn't any of the man's business, and he probably wouldn't
care anyhow.
He smiled.
'Have a seat. What can I do for you, sir?'
Morrison sat, awkward in his movement. Not a jock, this one.
'As you may recall, I am one of the project managers on the HAARP
project.'
'You're a long way from Gakona, Alaska,' Michaels said.
Morrison raised an eyebrow.
'You know about the project?'
'Only where it is located, and that it has to do with the
ionosphere.'
Morrison seemed to relax a little. He opened his briefcase and
produced a mini-DVD disc.
'Here is a rundown on HAARP--I know you have a higher security
clearance than do I, but this is all pretty much public background
material.'
Michaels took the disc.
'HAARP went on-line in the early nineties, has been operating on and
off since. We are in summer hiatus just now, for repairs to equipment.
Essentially, HAARP is the world's most powerful shortwave transmitter.
It was designed to beam high-energy radio waves into the ionosphere,
and thereby to perform various experiments to learn about space
weather--for our purposes, that's basically the flow of particles from
the sun and other sources into the Earth's atmosphere. These things
affect communications, satellites, like that.'
Michaels nodded. Yep. A snorer. He tried to look interested.
'The array, called the FIRI, consists of one hundred eighty antenna
towers on a grid of fifteen columns and twelve rows, on a gravel pad of
some thirty-three acres.
Each tower consists of a pair of dipole antennas that run either in the
2.8-to-7 MHz, or the 7-to-lO MHz range.
Each transmitter can generate some ten thousand watts of
radio-frequency power, and the combined raw output of the three hundred
and sixty transmitters is thus three point six million watts. When
focused on a single spot in the sky, this is effectively multiplied a
thousand fold to three point six billion watts.'
