square miles, but in the end decided it was more feasible and cost effective to use the aboveground wires, and Project Sanguine had been scrapped.
However, according to some reports, they’d actually started work on Project Sanguine, constructing more than two dozen miles of tunnels and even an underground bunker in the years before the environmentalists caught wind of what they were doing.
I could see where this might be going, and I hoped my hypothesis was wrong.
I read on.
The Wisconsin ELF station officially began operating on October 1, 1989, but even a decade before that there was vigorous debate about the environmental effects of the program and the resultant magnetic fields created by the station. Environmentalists claimed there would be wide-ranging and disastrous consequences-that the signals would cause leukemia in humans and all sorts of maladies to the wildlife of the region.
At the time, the Navy studied the problem and concluded that the risk of any adverse effects was minimal.
But in the 1984 case of Wisconsin v. Weinberger, the Seventh District Court disagreed-stating that there was substantial evidence of serious health hazards-and halted construction, but in the end the national security threat posed by Russia superseded the ruling, and the station was completed and commissioned.
Despite numerous subsequent studies over the next decade, no conclusive evidence was found to substantiate the activists’ claims.
But the environmentalists hadn’t given up.
Over the ELF station’s operational years, socially progressive and environmentally conscious groups held regular protests at the base, cut down the telephone poles that supported the electrical lines, and filed relentless federal lawsuits to close the Wisconsin station. State senators Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold even got into the act, demanding that the ELF site be shut down.
So.
A few threads came together.
All Ohio Class subs are equipped with antennas to receive the extremely low frequency waves and have onboard instruments that decode the ELF signals. However, since the subs don’t have miles of radio transmission wires, the communication between the station and the subs was one-way.
For that reason, the ELF orders were typically requests for the sub to surface to receive further communication, or to remain at depth and at immediate battle readiness.
Typically.
In 2004, the Navy, without warning, announced that they were closing the stations because they were outdated and no longer needed. The Michigan site was completely razed. Then, the military dismantled the communications array here in Wisconsin, taking down all the telephone poles as well as more than twenty-eight miles of transmission wires that had surrounded the station.
Naval personnel had bulldozed the station, removed all the rubble, and reseeded the field so that now all that remained was a looming maintenance building that was apparently left for the forest service to use.
I found myself wondering if the Navy would really invest nearly a quarter of a billion dollars and fifty years of research and then abandon a project just because it seemed dated.
Actually, they might.
But still, why then? Why 2004?
As all of this was circling through my head, I scrolled to the final PDF file and found a footnote that gave me pause.
According to some protestors, the ELF signal could be used to issue first-strike orders, although the Navy maintained that the signals could never be used in that way.
But in the 1996 case of Wisconsin v. Donna and Tom Howard, a former commander of a US nuclear submarine, Captain James Bush, testified that the primary purpose of ELF signals was to give go-codes to launch kinetic attacks against foreign adversaries.
In other words, to initiate nuclear war.
I felt a palpable chill.
A biometric ID card.
Above top secret access.
The preliminary Project Sanguine work was done in Wisconsin, possibly including tunnels being constructed.
Though I’m hesitant to make investigative assumptions, it was looking more and more likely that something still remained out there in the middle of the national forest.
Using my laptop, I pulled up the topo maps of the area and overlaid the snowmobile trails Donnie Pickron might have used to get to the sawmill.
The GPS coordinates showed that the site of the old ELF station lay just off the Birch Trail, one of the three routes that would’ve made sense for him to use. The Schoenberg Inn and the sawmill lie in northeasterly and southeasterly directions, respectively. Although much farther by road, the site was geographically relatively close to them both-a little over five miles as the crow flies.
As I was considering the implications, I heard a knock at the door. After drying my foot, I hobbled across the room and peered through the peephole, a habit formed from too many years of tracking people who want to kill you. Amber stood outside the room.
I cracked it open, letting in a gust of arctic air. “Hey, is everything all right?”
“Can I come in?”
“Um, well, that might not be-”
“Please.”
After a moment’s hesitation, I stepped aside, and she entered my motel room and shut the door softly behind her.
42
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Good. I’m doing good.”
“Your ankle?” She was eyeing the two buckets.
“Well,” I said, repositioning myself so I was putting less weight on it. “It’s okay.”
Amber looked at my swollen foot but refrained from comment.
Being alone in a motel room with her like this brought back memories, sharp, vivid. The three nights we’d spent together talking, sharing-a fire of intimacy born of common interests, goals, dreams. The memories made me uneasy, and I waited anxiously for her to explain her visit, all the while, the information I’d read about the ELF station kept itching away at my attention.
Quietly, and before I realized what she was doing, Amber approached me, then brushed her hand across my arm. “I was so worried about you when they brought you in to the hospital.”
I took a faltering step backward. “Don’t be concerned. Really, I’m all right.”
“When you were lying there unconscious, it made me think…” She took in a small breath. “I realized some things.”
I couldn’t see any way that this conversation was a good one for us to be having. Especially not here. Not now. “Amber, maybe you should go.”
“I came here to talk to you about me and Sean.”
“Amber, I’m not sure-”
“You know we’ve had our ups and downs.”
Actually, I hadn’t known about any problems the two of them were having, which was just further evidence of how superficially I knew my brother. And from past experience I was all too aware that when people use the phrase “we’ve had our ups and downs” it’s just a euphemistic way of saying “we’ve had our downs.”
“Things haven’t been good between us,” she said candidly.
