The Catalina had gone into the sea about a hundred miles north of the Aeolian Isles, a location Odysseus had likely visited in his epic journey. Although they could not see the islands from the bobbing yellow raft, Dodge had recalled spotting them from the air in the moments before the crash, and reckoned the shortest path to salvation lay to the south. Fortunately, after only a few hours of paddling, they encountered a passing freighter bound for, of all places, Naples, and their brief trial at sea came to a welcome conclusion. They did not linger in Italy; shortly after disembarking the freighter, they chartered a flight to Lisbon, where they were met by US Army Lieutenant Colonel Kerry Frey, who had traversed the Atlantic in response to their urgent summons.
“Sad news about General Vaughn,” Frey said, after the initial introduction. “He was a good soldier.”
“He went out fighting,” Hurricane said.
Frey nodded somberly, then turned to Dodge and proffered a thick leather portfolio. “Here is the information you requested.”
“I’ll read it in the air. What can you tell us about Von Heissel? Is he headed back to the States?”
“We’ve intercepted radio-navigation signals from Majestic that would seem to indicate that. But I have to be honest with you; Washington isn’t quite sure what to do about all this.”
“It’s Baron Otto Von Heissel we’re talking about,” Hurricane rumbled. “He’s got to be stopped.”
Frey pursed his lips. “We can order him to surrender once he’s back in American territory.”
“And if he refuses?”
“In theory, if we determine that he has hostile intentions, we could shoot his airship down.”
“Our friends are still aboard,” Dodge said.
“That contingency would only be used as a last resort.” Frey sighed. “Because Barron… excuse me, Von Heissel… was working with the War Department, the brass still expect him to deliver the weapon he promised. They’re having trouble accepting that he’s up to no good. If General Vaughn were here, they might be convinced—”
“Von Heissel killed him!” Hurricane exclaimed, slapping his thighs angrily.
“I believe you, but there’s no way to corroborate that. And given your own history with the general, no offense Mr. Dalton, there are some in the War Department who think you might be making all of this up.”
Hurricane appeared to be on the verge of a volcanic eruption, but Dodge forestalled him. “Thanks for giving it to us straight, Colonel. Von Heissel is planning something terrible. And he has our friends hostage aboard that airship. With or without your help, Hurricane and I have to stop him.”
“Don’t forget about me,” Nora chimed.
Dodge grimaced a little. That was a discussion he wasn’t looking forward to.
“I’ll get you back to the States,” Frey promised. “After that… well, I guess we’ll just have to see what shakes out.”
As they boarded Frey’s transport plane, Dodge pulled Hurricane aside. He held up the portfolio. “I’m going to try to figure out what Von Heissel’s really up to. Do you think you can come up with a way to get us aboard Majestic?”
The big man grinned fiercely. “I’ve got a couple crazy ideas, but we’ll need some help.”
“I’ll leave you to it, then.” Dodge settled in next Nora. “Since you’ve proven yourself as a crackerjack researcher, are you up for a little light reading?”
“Researcher?” She raised an eyebrow. “I had hoped that by now, you’d think of me as more than just that.”
Dodge couldn’t resist grinning at the flirtatious comment. “Believe me, I do.”
She answered his grin with a dazzling smile, but the moment could not last. “All right, what have you got?”
Dodge opened the portfolio and took out thick sheaf of papers. “Doc Newcombe said that Von Heissel’s machine is based on principles developed by Nikola Tesla. I asked Colonel Frey to bring me everything that’s been written or published on Tesla’s resonance wave theories and experiments.”
“How will that help us?”
“Tesla is a genius, but a lot of his stuff has been dismissed as crackpot science. The resonance wave machine is a good example of that. The scientists of the world dismissed it, but Von Heissel obviously found a way to make it work. The question is: why? What is it about that particular machine that would prompt him to go through all this effort? I think we’ll find the answer in Tesla’s papers.”
“How will we know if we see it?”
He divided the contents of the portfolio into two roughly equal stacks, and passed one to her. “Just look for anything that seems too crazy to be true.”
Dodge’s exhortation was not as useful as he thought it would be. Tesla’s writings and correspondences were rife with exaggerated claims and reports of successes that could not be independently corroborated or repeated. Tesla was a veritable P.T. Barnum of the scientific world, a showman who used extravagant tricks to get funding from wealthy industrialists for pet projects that held great promise, but never seemed to deliver. His massive tower in Wardenclyffe on Long Island was just such an example. Built with funds from financier J.P. Morgan near the turn of the century, its purpose, according to Tesla, was to transmit electricity without wires across the Atlantic. It would, he theorized, be possible for anyone, anywhere in the world, to simply pull electrical current out of the air, without the necessity of generating plants and a network of power lines. Tesla had been able to sell the dream, but after sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into the project with nothing to show for it, his investors lost faith and cut their losses. Yet, for all his failures, Tesla’s passion was as great as his provable genius, and Dodge could see why wealthy capitalists were so easily enticed by his vision for the future and his promises of what he could do, with just a little bit more of their money.
Then Dodge read something that sent a chill down his spine.
It was in an article published in the periodical The World To-Day in 1912, where Tesla was asked about his experiments with resonance waves. The first part recounted his experiments with a small device that delivered vibrations at variable frequencies. Tesla had found just the right frequency to cause a piece of two-inch thick steel to break apart.
“Sledge hammers could not have done it; crowbars could not have done it, but a fusillade of taps, no one of which would have harmed a baby, did it.”
Tesla had then tried his device on an unfinished ten-story steel building.
“‘In a few minutes’, he said, ‘I could feel the beam trembling. Gradually, the trembling increased in intensity and extended throughout the whole great mass of steel. Finally, the structure began to creak and weave, and the steel-workers came to the ground panic-stricken, believing that there had been an earthquake. Rumors spread that the building was about to fall, and the police reserves were called out. Before anything serious happened, I took off the vibrator, put it in my pocket and went away. But if I had kept on ten minutes more, I could have laid that building flat in the street. And, with the same vibrator, I could drop Brooklyn Bridge into the East River in less than an hour.’”
That seemed to Dodge like typical Tesla hyperbole, but then he kept reading:
“Tesla says that he can split the earth in the same way — split it as a boy would split an apple — and forever end the career of man.”
“Nora, listen to this.” He straightened in his chair, and read aloud:
“‘The vibrations of the earth have a periodicity of approximately one hour and forty-nine minutes. That is to say, if I strike the earth this instant, a wave of contraction goes through it that will come back in one hour and forty-nine minutes in the form of expansion. As a matter of fact, the earth, like everything else, is in a constant state of vibration. It is constantly contracting and expanding.