To achieve a launch speed of 3500 metres per second, the gun barrel was filled with an inert gas, and there were also other technical tricks but all was in vain. The cannons of HARP project could hurl their ballistic satellites only to heights of 180 kilometres, and that wasn’t enough to enter low Earth orbit. The experimental ingots, weighing almost two hundred kilograms, fell into the ocean time after time.
In 1967, the project was closed, but it had a completely unexpected resurrection in the eighties. That’s when Canadian engineer-artillerist Gerald Bull, one of the chief designers of HARP, got an invitation from Saddam Hussein himself.
There was a war between Iraq and Iran, and the Iraqi leaders, who’d failed in their plans for a quick seizure of the oil and gas province of Khuzestan, were in desperate need of a super-weapon to change the course of the war.
Bull’s new project was called Babylon. It was estimated that the 1000 mm, multi-chamber cannon could blast a six-ton projectile a thousand kilometres up, powered by a nine-ton charge. With it, Iraq would’ve been able to bomb Tehran all the way from Bagdad. The super-cannon could also fire special reactive shell-rockets with a mass of up to two tons. Four weapons were supposed to be constructed.
Bull’s first brainchild for Saddam was an experimental 350mm cannon – basically a copy of the cannons from the HARP project. It tested successfully and Iraq embarked on Big Babylon, which was supposed to change everything: the course of war, the balance of power in the region and the place of Iran on the world arena.
But Saddam’s triumph was not meant to be. The special services of a few countries of the West and the foreign intelligence of USSR interfered, slowing down the development of the project. The Iran-Iraq war ended without bringing any noticeable dividends to either side. Parts of the super-cannon, manufactured in Europe, were confiscated on the way to Iraq, and no matter how hard the Iraqi government tried to prove that these were for oil refining, they never made it to Bagdad.
And then in March 1990 Bull was shot near his home in Brussels. The killers were never found but behind it were maybe Mossad, the CIA or the KGB – who knows?
The experimental super-cannon and the rest of the project were completely destroyed by special divisions of UN during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. That was the end of super cannons – although there are rumours the Russian army is armed with the self-propelling 20 metre monsters Oka and Kondensator, which can fire shells, nuclear ones, up to fifty kilometres.
Tired from all this military history, I made myself another glass of Blue Hawaii, although without the extra Curacao, and returned to the recliner.
It occurred to me that the fates of both projects – the old artillery HARP and our highly technological HAARP – are very similar. They both began as objects of purely scientific interest, both went through the stage when the military got seriously interested in them, and both have become (at least nominally) weapons and… The similarities ended there – unless you listen to conspiracy theories, because the HAARP with double A hasn’t killed anyone yet.
Dozing off to the whisper of surf and the rustle of leaves, I suddenly saw myself as some kind of sea creature – a prawn or mollusc-nautilus – swimming in water pierced by shafts of sunlight.
I remember inexplicable delight from the sensation of weightlessness, the chill in the chest from the realization of how many kilometres of water there were beneath me, and a feeling of euphoria – which lasted until the moment when it appeared from the depth.
The octopus.
The disgusting creature noticed me at once and made a lunge. I felt that I cannot move, that I am shackled, my hands and feet are bound.
An octopus doesn’t kill its victim straight away. It goes about its business gradually, as if following a scheme. First it wraps its prey with its tentacles. Then is grips it with its suckers and injects poison with its sharp chitin beak. Only when the fish, crustacean or mollusc finally falls still, does the octopus begin to feed, tearing pieces off its paralyzed prey and swallowing them.
It looks like I am in the second stage. I am entwined by the slippery tentacles of this creature so tightly I can’t break free. Now the bite has come in and the poison is already entering my blood.
Waking up tangled in the blanket with a frantically beating heart and staring wildly, I grabbed the bottle of Curacao and gulped back almost the entire contents. Only then did the horror which took over me during my sleep ease off a little.
Sitting by the foot of Mauna Kea, breathing in humid and warm Hawaiian air, watching the sunset, the appearance of the stars and their falls into the dark endless ocean, I clearly realized – I have only one, last, chance.
The octopus’s poison is a virulent liquid, a complex mixture of alkaloids. On most of inhabitants of the sea – fish, crabs, crayfish, prawns, molluscs – it has the same effect, causing paralysis of the central nervous system and death. For a human this poison is also very dangerous. Dozens of cases are known where fishermen and divers have died after being bitten by an octopus.
But there are creatures – the golden armatus of the south seas, for instance – on which the octopus’s poison has a different effect. It stimulates their physiological processes, forcing their hearts to beat faster and their muscles to contract more powerfully. After an octopus’ bite, an armatus struggles in the tentacles so forcefully that it very often manages to escape and survive.
I found a picture of an armatus on the internet. It’s a not very big fish. It looks a bit like marlin but more yellow and with a flattened head. I don’t look very similar at all – and anyway how could a Homo sapiens and a fish be similar?
Nevertheless, I made the first meaningful moves to free myself from the deadly grip of the octopus while I was in Hawaii – right after the poisonous information bite the octopus had struck me through the agency of the Baseball player.
Even now I don’t know what project linked to HAARP I was supposed to join. Indeed, did such a project exist? But Lao Tzu says:
‘You can mould clay into a vase, but it’s the nothingness inside that is used. You can cut doors and windows in a house, but it is the nothingness in the house that is used.’
I was using what was given to me to change my life and my entire situation.
Later I completed an algorithm which I had begun to develop while in Hawaii.
Lao Tzu was my guru.
Orwell was my ideologist.
The octopus’s poison bubbled in my blood.
Hawaiian stars were shining on me from the sky.
I remember a storm roaring. The electricity flickered, wet palm branches whipped against the roof of my bungalow. Gusts of wind hurled rain water against the glass door and a big puddle washed in under it, which oozed slowly towards me.
I was sitting on a mat reading 1984 again trying to find in this book the words to inspire me and give me the courage to act.
I read on and with each line, each paragraph, I was submerging deeper and deeper into Orwell’s text – sinking into a swamp, a sticky quagmire, from which it was impossible to get out.
Images, characters and their actions engulfed me and the plot sucked me into its suffocating embrace. It was a delusion, a druglike effect, when that combination of chemical elements takes control of your mind and body so you are no longer your own master.
Orwell, like a Siberian shaman or Indian mahatma, plunged me into a trance and pumped my consciousness with surreal images, which turned out to be uncannily real.