Garbage In, Garbage Out

The Director of National Intelligence draws a thick black circle around a satellite photo of a harbor front factory using a permanent marker of the kind favored by POTUS. “Project GIGO” reads the headline, and “TOP SECRET” is stamped alongside in bright red ink. The Director leans forward on the plush sofa in the Oval Office, and solemnly hands the document to the President, who snatches it unaware of the sidelong glances and barely concealed smiles of the National Security Council members hastily gathered in his office for their final meeting of this tumultuous presidency.    

“GIGO is the most important facility in the United States Space Force portfolio, sir. Our finest minds, our most powerful systems are deployed here”, he points at the factory, “readying our nation for conflict with our Chinese and Russian…”.

The Secretary of Defense kicks him in the shin.

“… excuse me… our Chinese and European foes. Maximum security, the highest degree of secrecy.”.

The Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff leans in, “This is your legacy, Mister President!”.

The President nods knowingly and places the document behind him on the Resolute Desk. The Director weakly objects, but the President waves him away.

***

It is a bitterly cold December morning; sea smoke is drifting across the gray and frigid waters of Rockland harbor. The lobster fleet is on the hard, scores of winterized sailing boats and yachts are cradled on rusting boat jacks in the local boat yards, and the summer schooners are shrouded in white plastic sheets, idling, wharf-side. 

The stillness of the winter waterfront and the nearby downtown area is disturbed by a deep rumbling as a drab green armored truck rolls down Tilson Street. It draws to a halt momentarily, waiting for the iron gates of the GIGO facility to open, then the vehicle maneuvers into the yard, reverses up to the loading bay and disgorges its load into the gaping maw of the facility. Two workers in blue overalls and hard hats mill about, their sweat and breath billowing around them in the freezing air.  

Lorraine Draper is watching, taking notes from the comfort and warmth of her ancient Subaru, which is idling on a side street, cater-corner to GIGO gates. “8.00am, two drivers, five or six boxes, two crates…” she scribbles on the pad, making a mental note that there is no license plate on the truck. A GIGO security guard spots her, leaves his post, but before he can get to her, she drives away.

***

Lorraine stomps snow from her boots as she enters the cramped street-level office of the Rockland Telegraph and before she has even taken off her gloves, the long-time editor, Stephen Botts and close friend of her late father, puts down his mug of coffee, “I just received another complaint from GIGO”, he says.

Irritated, she tears off her gloves, stuffs them in her coat pocket and flings her notepad onto the desk and stares at Boss Botts, hands upon hips.

“Every other day, regular as clockwork, the truck rolls into town, dumps its load, collects some innocent-looking pallets, and leaves. Nobody, NOBODY is talking to me. Bunch of creeps”, says Lorraine. She takes off her coat and hangs it on the back of her chair, tucked in by the coffee machine and the sink.

Botts shrugs. “Just make sure you don’t get into any trouble. It’s these government people that worry me, not the police”. 

She is giving him the look. “You are not my father”, she says. 

Botts looks a bit deflated. “Okay, okay”, he changes the subject, “let’s get busy. Grab a coffee and give me 250 words on the Pie Festival. Lots of names; we need to get the circulation up.”

“Yes, Boss Botts”, she says, and mumbles something about eagles and turkeys under her breath.

He ignores her muttering, then looks out the window to find the source of a bass humming sound. A military vehicle, straddling both lanes of Rockland’s Main Street, is roaring along in a low gear, rattling windows and shaking old wooden buildings as it passes by. The truck is heading south, back to Boston, New York, DC, somewhere warmer.

Lorraine rolls her eyes and sits at her desk on which notes, clippings and photos have accumulated. As the youthful beat reporter, Botts assigned her courts and crime, the local council, the school board, planning board and Misc., each assignment represented by a thin pile of handwritten notes, print outs and publications. On Wednesday evening she will file her copy, sweep the clutter into a box, which will go into the eternal purgatory of the storage room. All the piles will be gone, save one: the GIGO pile, almost two inches thick and growing. 

She gets out her smartphone, “I need a life”, she thinks, idly swiping left through potential dates on her Tinder App.

***

Installed for another night on a stool at Morty’s, the south end dive bar, Yevgey Babikov, is living life full tilt. He is regaling drinking hole regulars with colorful stories of Mother Russia, and charming Beth the bar maid with a vision of balmy nights at a secluded dacha on the palm-fringed shore of the lovely Black Sea. He flashes his credit card, buys a round of drinks for everyone. Tomorrow, alas, he will be gone.

Later, after midnight, he dresses head to foot in black, pockets a miniature digital camera, slips out of the Motel and into the night, unnoticed. Minutes later he stumbles across icy-slick riprap that surrounds the GIGO facility, and he is cursing the bone-chilling cold that is making the mission more perilous than he’d anticipated. It is a moonless night, and in near total darkness he fumbles overhead for the fire escape ladder that runs up the ocean-facing wall of the GIGO facility, but the lowest rung is slightly out of reach. He jumps, misses, lands awkwardly on the treacherous terrain, and crashes headlong down the berm, breaking ribs and cracking his skull against a sharp rock at the waterline.

In the morning, the marine patrol hauls his frozen body from the water and brings the corpse to shore, where Lorraine is on hand with her camera.

***

Back at the Telegraph office. “I feel like we are characters in a Tom Clancy paper”, says Lorraine, describing her sleuthing around the motel. “The chief of police saw some documents in his room, an aerial photo of GIGO, thinks he might be Russian, but then the spooks turned up, and kicked me out” says Lorraine “They’ve cordoned off the Inn, sealed the entrance with black SUVs, dark windows, Maryland plates”.

“We still don’t have much of a story”, suggests Botts, “and tomorrow we go to print. Any chance you can give me a paragraph on tonight’s roller derby?” He needs padding for Misc.

“Damn. Sorry. Wish I could help, but I’ve got a tinder date tonight”, she says, grabbing her coat and rushing for the door.

“Make sure it takes place in a public place…. not like that date with the fellow you met at the quarry!”, says Botts, but the door slams behind her, and she’s already gone.

***

Kevin, the tinder date, is on time, well-groomed, wearing a pressed shirt, and he looks more attractive than his Tinder image. Lorraine is pleasantly surprised. They take their seats in the deserted Thai restaurant. He admits ignorance – another plus – of Asian cuisine, so she orders for both of them, and while they wait for the food she discovers a shared interest in hiking, biking, outdoorsy stuff, so things are off to a really good start. This is the first man she’s dated since the pandemic that isn’t dressed in macho hunting gear or stained contractor overalls. Better still, he has a steady job, his own car, his own apartment, and he even offers to pay for dinner. 

By the time the food arrives she is ready to ditch formalities and throw herself at him.

“So, what do you do for a living?” she asks, biting into the starter.

“I am a contractor for the U.S. Space Force”, he says.

She nearly chokes on the butterfly shrimp.

***

The silver orb is caught in the sun’s dying rays and looks like a second moon against the indigo sky. The spy balloon started losing altitude somewhere over Nova Scotia owing to the polar vortex that has Maine in its grip and it is going to ditch into the ocean, just beyond the Rockland breakwater lighthouse.

The temperature has fallen to minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and Yang Ming is jabbing at the transceiver with numbing fingers. He redirects the rotors to drive the dirigible out toward the open Atlantic but it’s too late. The big white bubble gently alights onto Penobscot bay, where it floats, serene, the payload of Lidar sensors and antenna still attached.

The balloon is lost, but Yang has images of Rockland and the data he needs for the Ministry in Beijing, so he pockets the USB drive and tosses the transceiver into the sea. He senses danger in his exposed position and starts loping across the mammoth granite breakwater blocks towards the shore and his rental car, but as he approaches the parking lot two giant men in dark suits appear from behind a fence and intercept him. After a brief scuffle, he is bundled, blindfolded into the back of a black SUV with Maryland license plates.

***

Lorraine wakes to the sound of thunder and finds herself in a strange bed and is momentarily disoriented. She is in Kevin’s bedroom, in his apartment. The place is immaculate, though lacking personality, it is also warm and clean, unlike the sex which was athletic fun. She can deal with this, she thinks.  He is awake, lying next to her, staring at the ceiling with a vacant smile, looking uselessly handsome. 

 “What exactly do you do for the Space Force?”, she asks, immediately regretting the lack of subtlety.

“I process the material that is delivered from our sources at the Pentagon”, he says a bit robotically.

The thunder gets closer.

Lorraine likes this fellow, but he can be evasive. Still waters run deep, she thinks. He is a man of mystery, and she can forgive the opacity.

“Can you be a bit more specific?” she asks, then straddles him and buries her face in the cup between his shoulder and his chin, nuzzles him until he laughs. She is happily ready to trade more calory-burning sex for information, no problem.

“Helicopters!”, he exclaims.

“Helicopters?”, she asks, perplexed, and she experiments with a subtle gyration of the hips.

“No. Helicopters! Look”, he says pointing at the window.

She looks out the window of his apartment just as two massive helicopters skid across the sky, bristling with rocket launchers, machine guns and radio antenna.

Lorraine leaps out of bed and scrambles for her clothing which trails from the front door through the hall to the bedroom. As she exits the bedroom, hopping on one foot as she puts on her pants, she notices that Kevin’s clothes are neatly folded on a chair. 

“Later”, she says, rushing out of the apartment.

She gets in her car, rushes down to the waterfront. A crane is lifting a tangled mass of spars, wires, and torn fabric off the foredeck of the Abbie Burgess, the Coast Guard ship. It dumps the mess onto a low bed trailer-tractor, where it is quickly concealed beneath a giant camouflage tarp, by a team of army engineers. The two helicopters are circling overhead; an apocalyptic scene that she captures on video with her smartphone.

***

In the White House basement, in the Situation Room, the National Security Council is in a celebratory mood. 

“Project GIGO is an unprecedented success”, says the Director of National Intelligence, “The Russians, the Chinese, they are tied in knots. Their intelligence assets have been exposed, compromised and to some extent disabled”, he waves a picture of the spy balloon lying on the ground in an Airforce hanger.

“SIGINT, HUMINT, GEOINT, OSINT, the INTs are pleased with the outcome”, says the crusty general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,  

“I think it speaks to the value of the Space Force”, says the Secretary of Defense, who gets a kick in the shins from the Director of National Intelligence.

The White House Chief of Staff chips in, “Mister President, they recommend the truth be disclosed, leaked out, if you will… It will embarrass our enemies”, he pauses, “and it could place the former guy in legal peril”. 

POTUS pretends not to hear, “Good work, gentlemen!”, POTUS signals that the meeting is over. He is tired and ready for a nap.

***

Lorraine is sitting at her desk in the Telegraph office, shuffling through her GIGO. A mosaic has coalesced, but at the center of things is the mystery that is the facility itself, the proverbial riddle wrapped in an enigma, she reflects. Much like Kevin.

It is the Spring Equinox, and Lorraine curses the snow, still glued in patches to the dark corners of Rockland’s side streets. She is in a foul mood. In early February, her video went briefly viral, thrusting her story of the spy balloon into the national conversation, yielding Lorraine a brief glimpse of journalism’s highest peaks, but her ascent was brief. The Super Bowl, a European war, inflation took center stage. The mysterious goings-on in small town Rockland faded out of view, and the GIGO facility remained defiantly anonymous.

Lorraine and Kevin are nearly an item; they skate across Megunticook, hike Camden Hills, watch movies at The Strand cinema, meet up for dinner or drinks two or three times a week, and she stays over at his apartment whenever the urge arises, which is quite often. Strong, silent Kevin is an easy-going and generous companion, she thinks, but he is incurious about her work, and self-deprecating about his own. She wishes he would tell her the truth. 

Botts' cellphone rings and Lorraine emerges from her reverie. It’s a 703 area code, the speaker is urgent, to the point, issues instructions and the line goes dead. Botts calls the number back, but he gets a “not in service message”. “Get your skates on, girl, the Space Force wants you to visit the facility”.

She is admitted into the facility by Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan C Brady, whose cropped white hair makes him look like a giant toothbrush, and she quickly establishes that he has the personality to match, providing very specific and obtuse answers to her open-ended questions.  He gestures to the loading bay which has figured prominently in Lorraine’s thoughts for months now.

“This is where we receive the material from the Pentagon”, he explains, “the boxes are removed from the truck, loaded onto this conveyer belt, and we send them to the adjacent processing department”. There are two open boxes near the conveyor belt; one contains 3-ring binders, plastic folders hanging files, the other reams of pale-green computer code print-outs. A worker pushes these boxes of trash onto the conveyor belt. Lorraine wonders whether this trash goes direct to Rockland’s town dump, makes a note to follow up.

Brady beckons her to follow him. The inner sanctum. She wonders whether the excitement she is feeling is the same as that once experienced by the archaeologists that discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun. Brady opens the door to Processing and waves her in.

It is a brightly lit warehouse, consisting of three aisles, four rows of giant racks that reach to the metal rafters of the three-story building. A forklift operator is loading a giant basket of paper onto one of the shelves. She is surprised and pleased to see that Kevin has taken a time-out from his work, has come down to the warehouse, to greet her. He is at the farthest aisle, wearing Space Force overalls over his natty casuals, and looks very handsome, she thinks. He waves and smiles. She waves back. She looks forward to visiting his workspace later in the tour.

“This is where the boxes are unpacked, they are dismantled and their contents are placed on these shelves on the left, the box cartons stacked directly on pallets over there”. He points. Everything is very neat and tidy. The forklift picks up one of the boxes of trash from a chute at the end of the conveyor belt. “Let me take you to Dispatch area”, says Brady.

“What about the processing? What about the analysts?”, she is taking notes.

“What about them?” he bristles at the questions.

“Where are the materials? How are they processed? Who does the processing?”, she asks.

“Well mostly the materials are paper, some plastics. Occasionally we get metal clips, binders and files, that sort of thing. We sort and stack. Sort and stack, all day long. Everyone pitches in”, Brady is ready to move on.

Kevin is still smiling and waving.

She seems a bit slow, so Brady gives her a moment to absorb the details, then opens the door, and beckons her through, “Let me take you to the Dispatch area”. She is hesitant, but he insists, and she follows.

“After we have processed the materials and boxes, we load everything onto pallets, wheel it onto this platform and load the trucks, who ship it back to the Pentagon”, he says, proudly drawing himself to attention.

Lorraine’s mouth is hanging open in disbelief, “That’s it? That’s the whole thing?”

Brady affirms.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me!”, exclaims Lorraine.

****

“You have gotta be kidding me”, says Botts, when she gets back to the Telegraph office and debriefs him on the visit to GIGO.

She is fuming, begins angrily banging out the GIGO denouement on her computer keyboard.

“Well at least your new boyfriend was telling the truth”, says Botts, not unkindly, “not like that fellow you met at the quarry last year”.