Written by Kevin Schmitt,
who also wrote The Bear and Eagle Affair
Chapter One
The amateur radio operator bent over with a
grunt to retrieve a fallen screw from an old but well maintained parquet wooden floor. Maybe this bit of
electrical work should have been given to one of the lads before they all left
for home. Maybe. The hands were
getting more and more arthritic and the light from the single forty watt bulb
didn’t help. But on the other hand, the teacher didn’t have anything better to
do while waiting for a ride back to the guest quarters.
Tomorrow promised to be a more interesting day
for the students. Eight vibroplex Morse code key boards sat on a
long improvised table, except for the one that was being rewired to a portable
speaker. That teaching tool would allow the user to hear his own key work and
enable the teacher to assess the student’s code sending skill as well. The
table took up most of the floor space in the tidy back room. The front area was
a pottery shop that had recently gone out of business.
Somebody’s cousin arranged for the back room
to be rented by the Syrian Technical
Institute of Radio. How The
International Telecommunications Union would benefit from these modestly
run workshops was open to debate. Ham
Radio was a small but praiseworthy effort made by individuals to bring
countries and cultures together. But most of the Middle East was looked upon as a
troubled child, where amateur radio aficionados had to bow their heads to the
political forces of the region. When a political movement gained power in a
Middle Eastern country, that party required assurance that the people with the short wave radio sets would function as
nationalists, not as members of a world community.
The volunteer Morse code instructor was a political wild card, and of the worse sort; but Rashid Jalal was still head of the STAR Program and he had a history of putting logic ahead of
politics. That was a comfort, but when a strange automobile rolled up in front
of the pottery shop, the British born instructor turned off the light and
exited the building with ears wide open.
A man in his mid-forties bailed out of the
French auto and met the instructor while she was still in the doorway.
Continued, CLICK HERE
