Mercer and Book burst out on deck and saw they were on the opposite side of the ship from where they’d abandoned the Jet Ski. There were no others outside, no one prepping the lifeboats to abandon ship, no one even standing in life jackets. And if Mercer and Book hadn’t had an inkling of what was coming, they would have remained within the protection of the ship’s superstructure, too — because far above the vessel a vortex was forming, a miles-wide toroid of clouds that was whipping up to hurricane strength. Lightning arced from side to side like the ethereal net inside a dreamcatcher. What made the effect even more unearthly was that the clouds were so high that the winds didn’t so much as riffle the ocean’s surface.
Down on the ship it was a calm, tranquil night…while overhead the sky looked like a fissure had been opened up to the depths of hades.
They wasted no more than a few seconds in awe of the atmospheric disturbance before taking off running. They had to round the aft section of the superstructure, dashing in a narrow space between the accommodation block and the main antenna pedestal. The air there was supercharged with so much static Mercer’s hair went on end.
They reached the starboard side. They couldn’t see the Jet Ski at first glance, but at this point it didn’t matter. Mercer and Book vaulted the rail, plummeting twenty feet and striking the water. They surfaced at the exact same time and started swimming away from the doomed ship. High above, the maelstrom was intensifying. Lightning was growing stronger, and its booms of exploded air were starting to reverberate across the ocean’s vastness.
Their only consideration was gaining distance, so they swam hard. For being so muscle-bound, Book moved like an otter and was soon outpacing Mercer stroke for stroke. Ahead and about two hundred yards to their left, a light began to flash in a dazzling display of colors, while below the storm’s rumble, “Stars and Stripes Forever” began to play. Their alarm had finally gone off.
Book reached the Jet Ski first and had it started even before Mercer arrived. They positioned themselves as they had before, and this time they opened the throttle to the max. Mercer kept looking back. The magnetic storm clouds were now so saturated with electricity they glowed an eerie green, while forks of lightning kept probing out from the doughnut-shaped anomaly. A few smaller bolts brushed part of the ship, their arcs so blindingly white that even several miles away they were painful to look at. He felt certain the storm was building to an electric potential many times that first strike.
In astonishment, Mercer watched as the toroid suddenly puffed out, as though it were taking a breath, an instant before it unleashed a barrage of lightning many times thicker than anything he’d ever seen. It was as if every lightning strike hitting the earth at that moment had concentrated above the Nikolay Zhukovsky.
The massive discharge struck the ship like a fist from above. For a blinding instant, Mercer could actually see the deluge of power ramming down through the main antenna, and then it came blasting back out of the hull in a searing white ball of plasma that tore plate from frame. The entire ship came apart like an exploding grenade.
Mercer had to look away, his vision marred by the afterglow of such an intense display. Moments later, they were struck by the heat of the blast, a hot ozone-laced wind that filled their lungs and made them cough.
The atomic-bomb-style dome of light finally faded, and when Mercer looked back again there was no evidence that anything extraordinary had happened. The clouds had been blown away, and the night sky shone clear again.
“Jesus,” Book said when he, too, looked behind them. He throttled down the Jet Ski to idle.
“To paraphrase an old TV commercial that was more prophetic than it knew: ‘It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.’ ”
29
Mercer and Booker spent close to three hours on that Jet Ski before being rescued in the middle of the night by a Sea King helicopter flown off the USS America. The explosion had been detected on monitors all over the planet, and it was at first believed to be nuclear in origin. In response, the navy had tasked their closest ship, one that was actually closer than some top brass had expected her to be, to investigate. Captain Tuttle and his crew searched the area for any sign of what had happened. Nuclear detectors aboard ship found no traces of fallout. As far as the world was concerned, the explosion had been a large meteor strike.
It would be several months before another navy ship would be dispatched to the region. They would use ROVs to scour the seafloor for any wreckage. Of special interest was the containment chamber for the Zhukovsky’s reactor core, which was eventually found intact and clandestinely salvaged from eleven thousand feet of water.
Mercer and Book were taken aboard the USS America that night — where Mercer returned Tuttle’s beloved .45—and eventually flown to Tarawa, for their commercial flights. Sykes was heading home to North Carolina. Mercer had one stop to make before allowing himself the luxury of going home. He flew first to Hong Kong on a connecting flight to his final destination — Charles de Gaulle International, just north of Paris.
In the world of backroom deals that was Washington politics, the real story of what had happened in the Pacific began circulating as soon as the magnetic storm had destroyed itself. Ira Lasko was widely credited with helping to prevent what could have been the greatest catastrophe to strike humanity since our ancestors climbed out of the trees. No one yet knew where to point the finger, but investigations were under way about the ownership of the Zhukovsky and the identity and most recent employer of a South African mercenary, first name Niklaas, last name still unknown.
Mercer let Ira take the lion’s share of the credit and couldn’t have cared less about the legitimate investigations being ramped up in the Hoover Building and at Langley. The only thing that interested him was the name the mercenary had coughed up as he lay dying on the floor of the ship’s control room.
Mercer had called Ira by satellite phone while he was still aboard the America and given him the name. Within hours, Lasko had called back, and they had pieced together the full picture.
“Roland d’Avejan and Eurodyne…I know of him,” Ira responded. “But the guy’s loaded — why would he do something like this?”
“His chief scientist aboard the Zhukovsky alluded to the basics, and it makes perfect sense — in a warped way,” Mercer said. “Until recently, Europe was enamored with green energy schemes. Windmills and solar panels were going up from the coast of Spain to Germany’s eastern borders, and governments were subsidizing it all with taxpayer money — billions of dollars per month.”
“This was all about global warming and saving the planet.”
“To some, sure. But to business, it was a cash cow. People were so passionate about it they were willing to fork over huge sums of money. Companies like Eurodyne were more than happy to supply the windmills and solar panels and gobble up the subsidy money like pigs at a trough.
“Fast-forward a few years, the world economy is in the crapper and suddenly Juan and Johan Q Public can no longer afford expensive green energy, so the public spigot closes. This also corresponds with a time when global surface temperatures were shown not to be rising as fast as everyone had feared. This put climate change hysteria on the back burner for everyone except those with vested interests: environmental NGOs who need funding, the media, which needs good scare stories, and a handful of companies heavily invested in green tech. Some of those simply cratered, like Solyndra and A123 Solar…but d’Avejan didn’t want Eurodyne to end up on the same scrap heap. So he came up with a plan to save it.”