As the bulk of the great ocean liner sank from sight, her red pennant with the white star that had been hanging limply, high on the aft mast peak under the dead calm of the night, suddenly unfurled when it touched the sea, as though in final salute to the fifteen hundred men, women, and children who were either dying of exposure or drowning in the frigid waters over the grave.
Blind instinct clutched at Bigalow and he reached out and seized the pennant as it slipped past. Before his mind could focus, before he knew the full danger of his foolhardy act, he found himself being pulled beneath the water. Yet he stubbornly held on, refusing to release his grip. He was nearly twenty feet below the surface when at last the pennant's grommets tore from the halyard and the prize was his. Only then did he struggle upward through the liquid blackness. After what seemed to him an eternity, he broke into the night air again, thankful that the expected suction from the sinking ship had not gotten him.
The twenty-eight-degree water nearly killed him. Given another ten minutes in its freezing grip, he would have simply been one more statistic of that terrible tragedy.
A rope saved him; his hand brushed against and grabbed a trailing rope attached to a capsized boat. With the last ounce of his ebbing strength, he pulled his nearly frozen body on board and shared with thirty other men the numbing ache of the cold until they were rescued by another ship four hours later.
The pitiful cries of the hundreds who died would forever linger in the minds of those who survived. But as he clung to the overturned, partly submerged lifeboat, Bigalow's thoughts were on another memory the strange man sealed forever in the ship's vault.
Who was he?
Who were the eight men he claimed to have murdered?
What was the secret of the vault?
They were questions that were to haunt Bigalow for the next seventy-six years, right up to the last few hours of his life.
THE SICILIAN PROJECT
July 1987
1
The President swiveled in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared unseeing out of the window of the Oval Office and cursed his lot. He hated his job with a passion he hadn't thought possible. He had known the exact moment the excitement had gone out of it. He had known it the morning be had found it hard to rise from bed. That was always the first sign. A dread of beginning the day.
He wondered for the thousandth time since taking office why he had struggled so hard and so long for the damned thankless job anyway. The price had been painfully his. His political trail was littered with the bones of lost friends and a broken marriage. And, he'd no sooner taken the oath of office when he had found his infant administration staggered by a Treasury Department scandal, a war in South America, a nationwide airlines strike, and a hostile Congress that had come to mistrust whoever resided in the White House. He threw in an extra curse for Congress. Its members had overridden his last two vetoes and the news didn't sit well with him.
Thank God, be would escape the bullshit of another election. How he'd managed to win two terms still mystified him. He had broken all the political taboos ever laid down for a successful candidate. Not only was he a divorced man but he was not a churchgoer, smoked cigars in public, and sported a large mustache besides. He had campaigned by ignoring his opponents and by hitting the voters solidly between the eyes with tough talk. And they had loved it. Opportunely, he had come along at a time when the average American was fed up with goody-goody candidates who smiled big and made love to the TV cameras, and who spoke trite, nothing sentences that the press couldn't twist or find hidden meanings to invent between the nouns.
Eighteen more months and his second term in office would be over. It was the one thought that kept him going. His predecessor had accepted the post of head regent at the University of California. Eisenhower had withdrawn to his farm in Gettysburg, and Johnson to his ranch in Texas. The President smiled to himself. None of that elder-statesman on-the-sidelines crap for him. His plans called for self-exile to the South Pacific on a forty-foot ketch. There he would ignore every damned crisis that stirred the world while sipping rum and eyeing any pug-nosed, balloon-chested native girls who wandered within view. He closed his eyes and almost had the vision in focus when his aide eased open the door and cleared his throat.
"Excuse me, Mr. President, but Mr. Seagram and Mr. Donner are waiting."
The President swiveled back to his desk and ran his hands through a patch of thick silver-tinted hair. "Okay, send them in."
He brightened visibly. Gene Seagram and Mel Donner enjoyed immediate access to the President at any time, day or night. They were the chief evaluators for the Meta Section, a group of scientists who worked in total secrecy, researching projects that were as yet unheard of-projects that attempted to leapfrog current technology by twenty to thirty years.
Meta Section was the President's own brainchild. He had conceived it during his first year in office, connived and manipulated the unlimited secret funding, and personally recruited the small group of brilliant and dedicated men who comprised its core. He took great unadvertised pride in it. Even the CIA and the National Security Agency knew nothing of its existence. It had always been his dream to back a team of men who could devote their skills and talents to impossible schemes, fantasy schemes with one chance in a million for success. The fact that Meta Section was still batting zero five years after its inception bothered his conscience not at all.
There was no hand shaking, only cordial hello's. Then Seagram unlatched a battered leather briefcase and withdrew a folder stuffed with aerial photographs. He laid the pictures on the President's desk and pointed at several circled areas that were marked on transparent overlays.
"The mountain region on the upper island of Novaya Zemlya, north of the Russian mainland. All indications from our satellite sensors pinpoint this area as a slim possibility."
"Damn?" the President muttered softly. "Every time we discover something like this, it has to sit in the Soviet Union or in some other untouchable location." He scanned the photographs and then turned his eyes to Donner. "The earth is a big place. Surely there must be other promising areas?"
Donner shook his head. "I'm sorry, Mr. President, but geologists have been searching for byzanium ever since Alexander Beesley discovered its existence in 1902. To our knowledge, none has ever been found in quantity."
"It's radioactivity is so extreme," Seagram said, "it has long vanished from the continents in anything more than very minute trace amounts. The few bits and pieces we've gathered on this element have been gleaned from small, artificially prepared particles."
"Can't you build a supply through artificial means?" the President asked.
"No, sir," Seagram replied. "The longest-lived particle we managed to produce with a high-energy accelerator decayed in less thaw two minutes."
The President sat back and stared at Seagram. "How much of it do you need to complete your program?"
Seagram looked to Donner, then at the President. "Of course you realize, Mr. President, we're still in a speculative stage . . ."
"How much do you need?" the President repeated.
"I should judge about eight ounces."
"I see."
"That's only the amount required to test the concept fully," Donner added. "It would take an additional two hundred ounces to set up the equipment on a fully operational scale at strategic locations around the nation's borders."
The President slumped in his chair. "Then I guess we scrap this one and go on to something else."