BACKGROUND
February 1918:
American Raymond J. Earl, codename "Pierre," received special instructions from his Colonel to assume the identity of a French soldier and get closer to a particular French fortress. It was for Earl to find out what kind of weaponry they were stocking and to size up the men's health. He unfortunately became cocky with his positive experiences in the earlier part of the week passing as a Parisian, and attempted to move up rank too quickly. Raising the suspicions of his superiors led to a search of his personal belongings. They found his journal.
He became a prisoner of The Great War. Locked in a box in the cellar of a French Church against the Hague Convention, he heard dignitaries speak in muffled voices above him. He listened as best he could. It sounded bleak for him and shortly after he was dragged away by his shoulders, feet trailing behind him, to the blood spattered stone wall. Usually there was a line up of prisoners at the stone wall, and a line up of guards too, but the other prisoners had developed dysentery and died, and somehow he was the last to survive. He heard the guard ready himself, there was a silence, and he heard a single shot. Earl fell to the sticky ground, crouching. After a moment, realizing he was still breathing with ease, he looked up and saw the guard lying on the ground, bleeding. He looked at his chest. It was clean. The door to the courtyard was open and he ran to it, looking for who had saved him but there was no one there. He stole the guard's pants, gun, and papers, and walked out the back gate of the facility without any harassment.
For some time he was troubled by his experiences from the last few years. The government gave him clear cut assignments, showed him maps, identification photographs, blueprints, and the like. But when he arrived in Europe, it was horrifyingly ugly. Men waded in mud for years with the rotting corpses of their friends and with hardly a scrap of food. The casualties were phenomenal, and the gains, indiscernible.
With clearance from his superiors, Earl fled to Switzerland. For six months he lived off the money in his bank account there. It afforded him a nice apartment in a small town, good food, and a respectable, but inconspicuous wardrobe. Reading the local news obsessively, as well as reading news from all world superpowers he began to keep track of the world's events. He began clipping articles, making connections between advancements in various countries, he began sleeping with his gun. He began sleeping with his gun while sitting up and facing the door.
One day a seemingly benign local news story about a comet appeared to be the beginning of a smattering of varied technological advancements across the warring world. All the articles contained the phrase "active power source." But the war ended and he was sent back to the United States, where he continued work as usual, but kept his article clippings until he found more and felt compelled to show his immediate superior. He was able to draw a clear line from the comet that landed in Switzerland, to the technological advances various countries had made since. They all had in common some sort of power source. He was sent to Switzerland under another name to track down what this comet really was and how the Swiss were using it for technology. The war was just over, but the United States was already preparing themselves for another attack.