Page 10 of Radar (Iniquus Certified Cerberus Tactical K9 #2)

Xander

Thursday

Iniquus Campus

Yesterday’s flight from Bratislava to D.C. was a groggy blur of tight confines and pain.

Back in his own bed for the first time in a month, Xander had a solid night’s sleep. And though he wasn’t a hundred percent, he could stand without wincing.

He was more than ready to go get Radar.

Xander had lucked out with warmer-than-usual weather. And even with the sun just creeping over the horizon, he was comfortable with a fleece pullover.

Edging up to the Iniquus guard station, Xander lowered his window and gave his name as he handed over his credentials. Now, he sat and waited as a Cerberus K9 sniffed his car for contraband.

Xander knew that Iniquus was a fortress masquerading as a country club, much like the newly acquired Zoric island, Davidson Realm, but with polar opposite motivations.

If the Zoric machine let loose the dogs of war, he might call on his Iniquus friends to let him come and survive the apocalypse with them.

With the Zorics swarming toward their own safety, Xander had to at least consider where he wanted to be on Doomsday. He contemplated going home to protect his mom. But his mom would say, “I’m fine. Get out there. Do good. Come home safe.”

“Do good. Come home safe.” That was the little bird that sat on Xander’s shoulder, singing the tune in his mom’s voice when things got tough.

He’d promised his mom he’d do just that, and Xander worked hard to make his word his bond.

But in this fight, Xander wasn’t so sure that his good intentions could beat the machine .

Precisely what did the Zoric machine do?

Hidden in the Kyrgyzstan mountains, aimed at the war zones to the south, it was hard to figure it out exactly.

Though everyone on the hunt for the apparatus agreed that the war-torn landscape offered the Zorics the degree of obfuscation they needed to continue their testing, anything that the Zorics engendered was easily attributable to something else.

Was that a machine or an insurgent attack?

Figuring it out was like trying to grab hold of a shadow.

What the IC community did know was that part of the Zoric capabilities included “smart spoofing,” where the machine could influence GPS navigation by the tiniest increment, a measurement so small, in fact, that it was imperceptible to the navigator.

In a short distance, it wasn’t a significant factor; over a long flight, it could throw a pilot completely off course, sending them to a different country or so far out over the ocean that they became fuel-critical.

Then there were the unaccounted-for electrical outages over wide swaths of Afghanistan to the south of Kyrgyzstan, extending to the Chinese border to the east and reaching as far as Syria in the west, but never at the same time.

The AWG had speculated that whatever the Zorics were doing meant they needed to move the machine between trial events.

If this were true, it meant the machine had to be a size that could be manipulated by a small group, if not a single person.

And whatever the Zorics were doing didn’t just stop at GPS manipulation.

In fact, a dystopian reader would find a correlation between Zoric’s machine and potentially society-destroying electromagnetic pulses (EMPs).

In fiction, a large solar storm could cause damage to power grids by overwhelming the transformers with an electrical surge.

Decades ago, it was an electrical grid attack that landed the Zorics on the CIA’s radar (small r).

The Zorics had always had alliances in Iran. And because of that, The Family had held a grudge against Canada because the Canadian Embassy helped get Americans out of Tehran during the hostage crisis.

In 1989, with his freshly calligraphed graduate diploma in energy systems, Medved’ Zoric was finally able to do something about his family’s thirst for retribution. Medved’ shut down Quebec’s power for nine hours.

Public-facing, the electrical disruption was caused by a geomagnetic storm on the sun.

But the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, working closely with Langley and the FBI, believed that it was, in fact, Medved’ Zoric sabotaging Quebec’s hydroelectric power.

Okay, not in fact . In speculation.

The IC community couldn’t prove the connection to Medved’ Zoric.

“Come back to me when you have concrete evidence. Then we can get you funds and teams to make that go away,” the heads of departments had said.

It was a catch-22.

Without funds and boots, how could Xander’s predecessors get the proof?

Then, the Berlin Wall came down, followed by the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Zoric way of life. The family was fractured and flailing in their new reality.

It was Medved’s ballsy attack on Quebec that helped launch him up The Family leadership ladder until he became Papa Bear.

Medved’ was no longer a young revolutionary. He was silver-haired and lead-hearted.

In the years since the USSR broke apart, the Zorics wanted their pound of flesh for the upheavals they had borne.

They learned to hijack satellite communications, shut down cell tower connectivity in ways that were subtle during the event but devastating in their consequences.

Just ask Iniquus’ Strike Force, which had almost lost their entire team because the Zorics disrupted their radio signals.

And the worst part of a dystopian landscape was the destruction of Syrian computer systems that handled everything from medical records to banking, energy to water, and food distribution.

Officers in the DIA and CIA working in the affected region began carrying their laptops and phones in Faraday bags to protect them from the effects, only taking them out for short periods to conduct their work.

Basically, the Zorics had proven in their reach from Kyrgyzstan that their machine could produce what amounted to the effects of an EMP.

And now, the Zorics were swarming to Singapore, preparing to go underground; it was the result of a concerted effort spanning nearly forty years.

As everyone knew, even the smallest trickle of water, over time, could erode the hardest of rocks.

Persistence was a tool for both growth and destruction.

Thwarting that destruction was the reason Xander was here at Iniquus.

Xander raised his hand to thank the guard who waved him through as the massive gates slid wide.

A short distance up the main road, Xander followed the curve east to the Cerberus campus, where he pulled into an open parking spot.

Still feeling the effects of his bruised ribcage, he climbed carefully from the car.

Slamming his door shut, Xander turned to saunter across the tarmac toward Iniquus’ Cerberus Headquarters.

Today, Xander added a pair of knee pads to his outfit and changed out his regular hiking boots with a pair that had less ankle support, allowing his feet a wider range of motion.

Things were going to get kinetic.

Halfway across the parking lot, Cerberus’s front door popped open, and the head trainer, Reaper Hamilton, emerged with Xander’s magnificent German Shepherd, Radar, at his side.

It was funny how hard Xander’s heart thumped every time he came to get Radar for their bonding time.

For Xander, Radar was home. He was family.

It was kind of interesting how this had all come about.

Digger was the first K9 acquired for their team.

Initially, Digger was trained to go into the field with the FBI and sniff out hidden thumb drives of child pornographers.

As priorities and funds shifted, Digger made his way into the AWG fold.

The Pentagon hired Reaper to further train Digger to find electronics in spaces where they didn’t belong.

In a house, Digger wasn’t indicating on a fridge or television.

But if someone dropped their phone in the woods, Digger found it easily.

Digger, being high-drive in the intelligence department, needed intellectual stimulation and lots of it. So, Reaper kept expanding his skills until Digger became the Swiss Army Knife of doggos.

That’s what saved Scott.

That’s what Xander needed—a nose that might find a cleverly camouflaged machine and a survival tool if things took a turn for the worse.

It was sheer luck that had brought Xander and Radar together.

Last year, a service dog training facility in Kansas conducted its testing and delisted some candidates from its program. Xander happened to be nearby and went to see if any of their dogs would make a good partner for his trek to the mountains.

With less than a year to get a K9 sniffer-trained and field-ready, Xander didn’t have the luxury of starting with a puppy. He needed a working-line dog that had a good start to his training.

Xander had walked into the Kansas facility and sat to observe those delisted dogs having their playtime. Right away, Xander locked eyes with Radar. Radar trotted straight over and sat by Xander’s side with a “Well, there you are, about time you got here” glimmer in his eyes.

They had been best buds ever since.

While Radar had excelled in his training at the service dog center, he was too high-energy for the medical alert service dog gig the team had envisioned for him.

Once Xander found and fell in love with Radar, he hired Reaper to go and make an assessment. Reaper said Radar had the character qualities that made him the right K9 for Xander’s needs, qualities similar to Digger’s.

Plans were made.

Training began.

How much smaller Radar had seemed back then when he was still an adolescent with paws too big for his body.

And here they were, a year later, Radar had filled out into his adult size; taller than average with a well-muscled physique.

The glistening caramel-colored fur framed eyes filled with wisdom.

Radar was an old soul. Radar seemed to carry an ethos of service much like the special forces brothers Xander had served with in war.

It was good to have a partner whom Xander didn’t just love but esteemed.

But now that Radar was qualified and proficient, Anna said the machine was on the move, probably west toward Europe.