Game Turn One, Part One
March 15, 1988
Morrow Industries Pajaro Lake Training Center
Pajaro Lake Utah, is a dry, hot deserted salt lake bed. In the summer, the temperatures could reach 120o in the shade, if there was any shade. As for rain….it last rained here back in 1954, a glorious three-quarters of an inch that rapidly evaporated and left a fleeting memory.
Back in World War Two, the Army Air Corps had built a short concrete runway and established a refueling base to be used if the Japanese ever invaded the West Coast. Like lots of other such bases, it had spent its time in obscurity, seeing the occasional in-flight emergency landing or lost trainer to break up the utter uselessness of its existence.
After the war, the Army Air Forces stripped the barracks, cook shack, Flight Ops building and its sole hanger of anything useful and slapped a shiny new lock on its gate and abandoned Pajaro Lake to its slow, roasting existence.
In 1957, a new defense contractor, Morrow Industries, purchased the abandoned air strip and built another dozen buildings to house a “test and development” center. Exactly what they were testing and developing was a mystery to the dozen or so locals who made a rough living herding sheep and goats in the nearby mountains. All they ever say over the years were the semi-trucks and buses that rumbled in and rumbled out every couple of months.
The years passed.
The same pattern played out as well, as a handful of trucks and buses rumbled in every couple of months and then rumbled out. Occasionally a handful of people could be seen, but they always stayed in the confines of the old base.
Area Administrator Kathleen Drummond sat at her desk, typing away on her keyboard, completing another report. Region III Recon Team 34 had finished its training and had arrived at Pajaro Lake for their final step. Cryogenic Freeze.
One last briefing and then they would enter their freeze tubes.
Drummond finished typing and sent the day’s reports to Headquarters. After a moment, she reached over to her intercom and pressed a button…
“Yes Ma’am?”
“Jerry, pass the word for Recon Team 34 to meet me in building seven for final mission brief.”
“Yes Ma’am!”
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The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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