“Really?”
“Oh, absolutely…Earhart hunting is a cottage industry. Bits and pieces purported to be from her Electra have been found all across the South Pacific. Gardner’s just the most recent. Before that, one of the prevailing theories was that she and her plane were captured by the Japanese. She was tried and executed for spying, and the Electra ended up in some secret warehouse like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
“Neat theory…except the U.S. occupied Japan for seven years following the war and never found any secret warehouses.”
“I said theory, not fact.”
“Sorry,” Mercer said, a little distracted. He was already running equipment checklists in his head. Some of what he thought they would need should be available in Fiji, while some would have to be brought in. “This is all really good, Jason. I can’t thank you enough.”
“Piece of cake, my friend. All I want in return is the right to keep studying these lightning stones of yours. It is spooky, spooky stuff. Between its attraction to lightning and all its other bizarre properties, it’s best that it sits in a nice safe laboratory.”
“Let me ask you…” Mercer said. “I get that these crystals are unusual, but a lot of people are dead over them — and someone has shelled out a lot of money to lay their hands on the source lode. Why?”
It was clear that Rutland had considered the question already but didn’t like his answer. “The short answer is I don’t know. There are a ton of possibilities, but for any of them to be commercially applicable, you’d need a lot more of the crystals than have been found — or a way of growing them yourself.”
“Susan Tunis and my friend Abe were investigating how cosmic rays affect cloud formation, and how that interaction is likely to naturally regulate global temperatures. If their findings are correct, that could mean the climate is nowhere near as sensitive to man-made carbon dioxide as we’ve been led to believe.”
“Meaning what…that global warming won’t be as bad as everyone says?”
Mercer nodded. “That’s what they were researching. Because the claims of climate change are so broad and so far into the future, many of them are unfalsifiable. They were trying to prove something very specific so that at least part of the hysteria can be put to rest. Abe was using the Herbert Hoover crystal sample to protect the experiment from galactic ray contamination. So there is research potential for this stuff, but any commercial application would need a lot more than has ever been discovered.
“There has to be something else, Jason, something that makes it unique. Do me a favor, and keep thinking about what someone who obviously has no morals could use it for. They’ve killed to get their hands on it, so I imagine their final intentions are pretty shady. Think weapons.”
“Sure,” Jason said. “I’ll game some potential military applications and see what makes sense.”
“I want you to be careful. These bastards are ruthless. There’s no way they can trace you to me. I never used your name and my phone wasn’t tapped. All the same, keep a low profile for a few days, take Felicia someplace if you can get away, all right?”
“She can’t get time off from the station, but I’m heading to Houston for a conference in a couple of days. There’s no reason I can’t bump up my plans.”
Mercer hit the bell to tell the bus driver he wanted off the bus and held out a hand. “Thanks. With any luck in a week or so you can go down in history as the man who located Amelia Earhart’s airplane.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be the schlub you sent out to do the grunt work.” Mercer chuckled. “People remember Howard Carter, not the Egyptian shoveler who actually dug out King Tut’s tomb.”
22
The Akademik Nikolay Zhukovsky was 560 feet of post-Soviet glory. Her hull was painted black, the superstructure white, and all interior passages that particular shade of institutional green that the Russians seemed to love so much, or could purchase at a tremendous discount. Her superstructure was low and almost sleek and would have given her a racy line, especially since she didn’t need an ugly soot-blackened smokestack. But what made her functional was also what made her ugly. Forward of the three-story superstructure were two massive dish antennas measuring more than a hundred feet in diameter, which made their outer edges hang far over the ship’s rail. Aft was an even larger antenna. They resembled the skeletal dishes used by radio astronomers. The first two were mounted on powerful hydraulic gimbals, so they had some degree of directionality. The aft structure was so large it was permanently affixed to the ship and overshadowed the rear deck like a monstrous upside-down parasol.
The Zhukovsky had been conceived and constructed as a mobile tracking station for the Soviet version of the space shuttle, a reusable orbiter they called the Buran. Though the program never got past a single unmanned flight, a great deal of infrastructure was put in place for a time when squadrons of Burans would orbit the earth and ostensibly terrify the West with Russian strength and ingenuity.
And like so many projects the Soviets attempted as their government was about to collapse, most of it was for domestic propaganda. While the American space program enjoyed the hospitality of dozens of nations who allowed tracking stations, the Soviets were forced to build their own floating system because only a handful of countries had strong diplomatic relations with Russia. In that regard, the Zhukovsky made sense. What did not make as much sense — and where Soviet bombast came into play — was the fact that the ship and her planned sisters were all atomic powered. There was no functional need for nuclear reactors to power them; the energy needs weren’t outrageous. But the Soviet planners simply liked the idea that their latest creation had the most modern, efficient power plants, and that their mastery of the atom was so complete they could employ nukes on civilian research ships. America had gone a similar route with a nuclear-powered freighter called the Savannah—until it was realized that propaganda was only necessary when you were falling behind.
While the Akademik Zhukovsky never got a chance to fulfill her role in the space race, she did earn another assignment. Rather than being decommissioned, the Zhukovsky had been laid up in a naval base near Vladivostok, and her nuclear plant was kept operational as a backup power supply for the base’s notoriously unreliable main generators. It was a rather ignoble end, but it had saved her from the scrap heap.
D’Avejan had approached the base commander with an offer to buy his backup power source. The ship needed extensive refit to make her seaworthy once again, and the price was quickly agreed upon. The corrupt admiral had even offered the use of his base facilities to revive the vessel. That took six months, and ate up the better part of the Luck Dragon trading company’s slush fund, but the payback was going to make d’Avejan’s purchase the greatest investment of all time.
After leaving Vladivostok, the vessel had stayed well clear of established shipping channels — with the exception of a chartered helicopter delivery from Kushiro, Japan, which contained the crystal sample recovered in America. Akademik Zhukovsky was now in the Pacific Ocean, approaching the equator in a remote spot north of New Guinea. The irony that the mission had taken them there, considering what had been learned in the last forty-eight hours regarding the remains of Earhart’s plane, was not unnoticed. The bulk of the crystals they sought were less than a thousand miles from the ship’s current position, and they intended to find them.