“Okay. I’ll get it to you shortly.”
He sat down with Tom at the Round Table in the mission room. Tom brought him up to date with the Hanford Nuclear Site and the secret nuclear waste storage facility deep beneath the hills of Trinidad. The Secretary of Defense denied knowledge of the secret facility, dating back to the Manhattan Project, and the defense company Camelot Weapons Industries. An emergency response team from the Hanford Nuclear Site had been sent in to plug the tunnel.
It appeared that someone had recently dug the submerged underground tunnel to access a secure vault housed inside the Camelot Weapons Industries subterranean storage facility. Although what was stolen and what was originally stored there no one knows.
Sam said, “So we’re done with the project?”
“We’re done,” Tom confirmed. “The Secretary of Defense has thanked us for our service, and advised that she will personally oversee the cleanup of spent nuclear waste, and the investigation into the secret nuclear storage facility and Camelot Weapons Industries. Now, do you want to fill me in on why everyone keeps wanting to kill you?”
Sam said, “I’m just one of those guys… that that sort of thing keeps happening to, I guess.”
He then brought Tom up to speed with everything that had happened in the past few days. About the evil creature now known as Excalibur who was hunting them, as well as Caliburn, their highly intelligent dog, and their most likely history as military experiments into genetic development of hyper intelligent animals for war.
When Sam was finished, Tom said, “I don’t get it.”
Sam frowned. “What exactly don’t you get?”
“What does any of this have to do with an old Arthurian Legend?”
“I have no idea. But I intend to find out.”
“I mean, everything here is from an old Medieval legend.”
Sam said, “Technically, if King Arthur existed, the legend originated during the Dark Ages.”
Tom smiled at Sam’s pedantic reference to the date surrounding a most likely fictional character who, despite his unending popularity, has no evidence of having ever existed. Tom said, “All right. Even so, look at this. You meet a beautiful woman named Guinevere three days ago…”
Sam lifted a hand to dismiss the coincidence. “She was backpacking in the Tillamook State Forest!”
“And yet, her brother was connected to the secret experiment, which involved forging new Arthurian weapons — Excalibur and Caliburn?”
Sam said, “I know, it looks kind of bad…”
“Forget bad. I just want to know what’s going on. I mean, after all of that, I happen to find someone just days ago made a tunnel into limestone half a mile long to access a secret underground vault for a company called, Camelot Weapons Industries? I mean, come on, the coincidence is all too much. Next I’m expecting a wizard like Gandalf or Dumbledore to come along…”
“You mean Merlin?”
“Yeah, that’s the one I was looking for.”
Elise stepped into the room. Her eyes wide and a grin planted on her lips.
Sam looked at his watch. It had been fifteen minutes, probably too early for her to beat the encryption. “What is it?”
“It’s done. I cracked the encryption code.”
“Well done.” His eyes exchanged a glance with Tom. “Looks like I win the bet.” Then, to Elise, he asked, “What did you find?”
“Dr. Jim Patterson left a message for us,” she said. “I know what we have to do, but you’re not going to believe it.”
Sam asked, “What did it say?”
Elise took a determined breath and said, “We need to find Merlin’s SPELL book in order to defeat Excalibur.”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Sam studied Tom’s face.
It was set with deep lines of incredulity.
Tom crossed his arms and said, “See. That’s what I mean; this whole King Arthur legend thing has now gotten way out of hand!”
The creases in Sam’s grin darkened. “Hey, I’ll be honest, I’m pretty skeptical about finding Merlin’s SPELL book too, and I’ve seen a lot of unbelievable things.”
“Yeah, well, think what you like, but Dr. Jim Patterson certainly believed it was the only way to defeat Excalibur, and given what it says about Excalibur, I tend to believe him.”
Sam asked, “What does it say about him?”
Elise said, “Excalibur and Caliburn were part of an extremely secret weapons development project that Dr. Patterson directed at Camelot Weapons Industries.”
Tom shook his head. “The Secretary of Defense told me she’d never heard of the company, let alone any secret projects, or what they might have stored there.”
Sam crossed his arms. “It wouldn’t be the first time the Secretary of Defense has kept secrets from us when she believed that it was in the interest of national security. Or to avoid political backlash, for that matter.”
“And burying nuclear weapons somewhere and then denying it until their waste products leak into North America’s second largest river system, I tend to think would probably cause some serious political backlash,” Tom added.
“Exactly,” Elise said. “But in this case, I think you might be wrong.”
Sam asked, “Why?”
“According to Dr. Patterson, Camelot Weapons Industries didn’t have anything to do with nuclear weapons or the storage of nuclear waste products. In fact, they had been given the underground secret location to develop the King Arthur weapons based on Merlin’s SPELL book.”
“Why?”
“The same reason the location was used during the Manhattan Project to store deadly spent nuclear waste material…”
Sam said, “Because it was far enough away from anything and everything that, if things went wrong, they could contain it!”
Elise exhaled. “Exactly.”
Sam asked, “But what happened to the project? And why was a British defense system being built in America?”
“According to Dr. Patterson, there was a problem roughly ten years ago with the program that was originally being developed by MI-6. Something to do with an internal ethics committee shutting them down.”
“Experimenting on the blending of human DNA with a multitude of other animal species to develop the perfect fighting chimera… Gee…” Tom said, sarcastically, “it’s hard to imagine why an ethics committee might have a problem with that.”
Elise didn’t bite with the ethics debate. Instead, she knew her job was to provide facts. “Upset by the loss of nearly a decade of research — both scientific and archeological — the original team of seven MI-6 operatives decided to defect to the US in exchange for the right to complete the project in secret, and sell its findings to our Department of Defense.”
Sam said, “Well, that at least answers the question about motivation. If their project had scored a major defense contract it could have been worth millions.”
Elise shook her head. “Not millions. It was going to be counted in billions. Over the course of its development, the project was estimated to eventually hit a trillion US dollars!”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t understand. Developing super human soldiers is nothing new or extraordinary. Even the best soldiers — fast, strong, intelligent, resilient, you name it — wouldn’t be worth a trillion dollars. So what was the program really about?”
“It all has to do with an end game…” Elise said.
“Which was?”
She said, “The development of an impenetrable new material.”
Sam remembered how Guinevere’s shotgun rounds didn’t even give Excalibur pause. “They weren’t just looking at protecting their soldiers, were they?”
“No. The contract’s initial project was to develop a material that couldn’t be damaged using traditional methods of warfare. The second part was to then mass-produce that material so that defensive shields on aircraft, tanks, APCs, helicopters, you name it, become invincible…”