“Safe-lock boxes,” Crust said. “The van is equipped with four of them. For situations just like this. Go ahead. Reach behind your head. Push the release.”
I reached behind my head. Found an indent in the panel wall. Pushed it. A second later, I had a loaded M9 in my hand too.
“Nifty,” I said.
“I know. Wicked feature. It was my idea. Sometimes they listen to us field guys,” Crust said. “Shall we, then?”
“Shall we what?” I asked.
“Figure this the hell out,” Crust replied.
“Why not?”
I guess I didn’t sound convinced.
“Look,” Crust said. “I understand that you don’t know who you can trust now, but I’m here to tell you that nothing has changed in that regard. I’m still your unit leader. So spell it out for me. Everything from the moment we parted ways at the hammam, exactly as it happened.”
I looked Crust in the eye. I thought about lying to him. Then I made a bet. I told the truth.
Chapter 14
I told Crust about both the Tesla journal and exactly what had happened with Jean-Marc. Crust sighed. The interior of the van was dark, the only light provided by the eerie glow of the computer screens, but I could tell that what I was saying wasn’t entirely new to him.
“Mike, you understand, that there is more going on here than just your father’s whereabouts, correct?”
“I’m beginning to get that impression.”
“The whole situation is wrapped around the Tesla technology in that journal. I’m no expert, but it sounds as though the journal you found contains research on a Tesla Device. A directed-energy weapon. We got confirmation of the Device’s existence around the same time we began to suspect a mole. That’s why you weren’t brought up to speed.”
“Because you like to send your agents in blind?”
“Because we didn’t know whether we could trust you.”
“What’s changed now?”
“You gave up your weapon, that’s what,” Crust said. “It might have been a stupid thing to do, but what’s changed is that I believe you, Mike. I believe you’re telling the truth.”
I listened, but I was going need more than that.
“Tell me what you know about Wardenclyffe Tower,” Crust said.
“It was a transmission tower built by Tesla in the early 1900s — a proof-of-concept device for wireless broadcasts and the wireless transmission of electricity.”
“And?” Crust said.
“Are you looking for speculation here?”
“Whatever you want.”
“And there are some schools of thought that say it was the wireless transmission of an electric charge from Wardenclyffe tower that caused the Tunguska event.”
“Yahtzee!” Crust said. “On June 30, 1908, five hundred thousand acres of Russian tundra near the Tunguska River were flattened and burned by an event that most of the world blamed on an asteroid strike. As it was, Tesla was documented to be running a test atop his Wardenclyffe Tower Energy Device the same night that Tunguska was hit.”
“So?” I said. “Tesla is working on his Device, Tunguska gets hit. Big deal. It’s possible that the two are related, but by no means guaranteed. They have a name for that fallacy in math. It’s called confusing correlation with causality. Just because A happened, doesn’t mean B caused it.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Cut to 1934.”
“It’s not as if I was briefed on this,” I said.
“So let me brief you. Twenty-six years later, in 1934, Nikola Tesla made claims to have invented a teleforce weapon. He called it a peace ray, a weapon to end all war. In reality, it was a directed-energy weapon capable of massive destruction. He tried to sell the Device to the United States, then to various European governments. He had no takers. No one believed it would work. Then he tried one more government. A government that had had experience with his experiments before.”
“So we’re back to the Russians?”
“Who else?” Crust said.
Crust reached into his pocket and tapped the screen of his Samsung smartphone. Three large monitors built into the wall of the van immediately lit up. The middle screen displayed what looked like a faded color photo taken many years previously. There was a bleak backdrop of straggly Northern trees and patches of unmelted snow. Spring in the northern latitudes. And there was a chain-link fence guarding a galvanized steel tower. The tower was made of interlocking metal struts which rose from a wide base, growing progressively narrower and more needle-like until they reached the top. At the top of the tower was a metallic ball.
From the scale of the shot, it looked like the ball at the top was big. It had to have had a diameter of at least ten or twelve feet. But it was hard to really see what you were looking at until you took a closer look at the picture. Because what had looked like unmelted snow on the ground was, on further inspection, something else. It looked like foam. Fire-retardant foam. And it was there because the ground at the base of the tower had been blackened and burned. When I looked closely, I could see tiny wisps of smoke rising off it. I knew what the picture represented — Wardenclyffe Tower. Like the one in the journal, but a more technologically advanced version.
“Tunguska was a wake-up call for the Russians,” Crust said. “Thirty years later, what other governments had believed to be science fiction, the Russian government had accepted as fact. They bought the blueprints for Tesla’s Device in 1938. They then proceeded to refine it over the next sixteen years. This photo was taken in 1954. A short time after it was taken, for reasons as yet unclear to us, the prototype was disassembled and smuggled out of the Soviet Union by the Green Dragons.”
Crust watched my eyes. He knew my interest was about to get personal. The Green Dragons were, after all, the group responsible for kidnapping my father.
“And then?” I said.
“Our sources say the Device never got to its destination. It went missing. From what we can tell, the Green Dragons lost it just as the cold war was heating up.”
“Then what?” I said.
“Now, generations later, we hear chatter from our Dragon friends. As near as we can tell, they want to use the Device to destroy a major metropolitan area.”
“Where?”
Crust tapped his phone and the photo of the old Tower disappeared to be replaced by a map of the globe, three panels wide. Turkey was represented by a red dot in the center of the map, concentric rings rippling out from it to hit cities around the globe. Almost the entire United States was within range, as was Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America.
“Even if we use a nominal six-thousand-mile range, like the one achieved when the Wardenclyffe Tower prototype took out Tunguska, Turkey’s central location means that this thing can hit almost anywhere on Earth, including America: New York, Washington, Chicago, nearly everywhere is vulnerable. Add another thousand or so miles, fire it across the pole, and it can hit the West Coast too.”
Crust tapped his phone again.
“This is what we predict will happen when the beam hits.”
The map of the globe disappeared from the screen to be replaced by a sunny shot of the Manhattan skyline. Everything looked fine at first. Sparkling. Happy. Except then a thick bolt of what looked like lightning struck the south end of Manhattan, and I could tell that it wasn’t going to be that kind of movie. The bolt of energy didn’t just strike and disappear like a regular bolt of lightning either. Instead, it hit the ground and thousands of smaller bolts flew out of it like an electric wind.
The bolts of energy exploded through the trees and buildings in an unstoppable wave destroying everything in their path. Skyscrapers crumbled and taxis and buses flew through the air, people reduced to ashes as the energy storm passed through the city in a raging inferno of sparks. When it was done, nothing was left standing. Buildings were twisted and melted and the ground was burned. People in the streets were vaporized. All that was left was a huge cloud of dust hanging over the charred earth.