Operation LAST LIGHT

TOP SECRET//HCS-P//SAR-WHITE DOVE//NOFORN

Operation LAST LIGHT is the most consequential and most closely held operation in the Departmental record.

12 November 1983. The Beast, loose in the upper gallery of Ark Chasm for 106 days following The Trumpets, was unmade by a simultaneous strike on three vectors.

Concept of operation

1. Kinetic. Two sub-megaton devices, emplaced by mining charge, sited to hold the gallery rather than to bury it.
2. Cognitive. Tone-0V inverted and phase-locked through forty-one transducers set into the ice, requiring the officer in command to waive her own Protocol E-R/OBLIVION.
3. Material. Nine objects of the Temple Mount inventory, positioned per an arrangement recovered from the Mount Qasioun reliefs in 1959.

Result

No remains. No crater. No thermal signature. No radiological signature above background.

In the centre of the gallery floor, at the point where the transducer array converged, The Apple.

Casualties

Fifty-four committed. Thirty-one killed. Four missing. Nine permanently reclassified.

None of the four missing were inside the gallery at detonation. One is John Arledge, who was not on the manifest.

The vocalisation

At 0340 hours the entity vocalised. Nine of the eleven personnel present subsequently produced identical transcriptions, in isolation, in English:

Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.

Revelation, chapter 10, verse 4.

Disposition of records

All recordings, transcriptions, telemetry and annexes were destroyed by the hand of the officer in command on 20 November 1983. The transducer array was cut up and dispersed. The nine objects did not survive.

The operation exists in this archive only because a single summary was written, at COPY 1 OF 1, and because the officer who wrote it recorded in it that she was aware of both readings of her own decision.