Shortwave Alert

by Lloyd B. Abrams

He came awake with a start. It wasn’t even light out. Outside the balcony door, a mockingbird was working through its repertoire of calls. Once, he couldn’t believe that all these squirrels and birds were chittering and singing at four in the morning until he realized that the chorus of sounds was the product of a single prolific mockingbird.

Automatically, his fingers searched for and found the thin wire under his pillow and he pressed the RadioShack mini earphone into his ear. He pushed the <sleep> button which would turn on his Sony shortwave radio for an hour, and he started to scan up from 5000 kHz.

He knew from experience that there was an ultra right-wing station that broadcast around 5080 and he was often both fascinated and disturbed when he listened to the diatribes and the “interviews” before he fell back asleep. He had considered adding the station to one of his presets but never got around to it.

This morning, the program seemed more vitriolic – and sounded more urgent – than usual. A preacher with a southern accent was railing against big government, mud people, the godless, and on and on. He started to fall back asleep, until he heard a short low tone followed by a disembodied electronic voice announcing, “It is now zero eight hundred hours UTC. T-minus six hundred and counting. Tune to ten point two eight five megahertz immediately.”

Ten point two eight five? The popular 31 meter band covered the spectrum into the high nine thousands, and the time signal from Fort Collins in Colorado was broadcast at exactly 10000 kHz. This frequency, 10285, was outside any of the usual shortwave broadcast bands. He hit the button to light up the LED, punched in the five digits, and then <execute> on the keypad. This could be really interesting, he thought. Clandestine broadcasts or pirate radio programs, when he found them, were often repetitive or boring – and were sometimes only repetitions of series of number – but he had always been intrigued with the idea of listening to something secret or covert.

He heard only the hiss of dead air. Disappointed, he started to doze off, but four short beeps immediately awakened him. And then a deep voice, expressionless though authoritative: “This is high command. Our mission will commence, as scheduled, at fourteen hundred hours. Everything is set and in motion. You all know what your assignments are. Tune in again in exactly one hour. May God be with you.” And then dead air.

“What the fuck?” he said aloud to himself.

“Mmm, what is it, honey?” His wife sleepily asked.

“Oh, nothing. Just a bad dream. Go back to sleep.”

No longer tired, he turned and sat up in bed. The earphone popped out of his ear, and he rushed to press it back in. He heard his wife’s breathing become regular and deeper.

And he realized, at that moment, that he was all alone.

– This story, originally written in 2002, was resurrected from my “Works in Progress” folder

Originally written / December 10, 2002 .. Rev 3 / April 22, 2020

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April 22, 2020 … Copyright © 2020, Lloyd B. Abrams