the writing of Kevin Schmitt

.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

The Dire Dimension Affair



     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

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