Lamont said, "Gotcha, man. Surprised you. Happy birthday."
"One more gone," Ronnie said.
"Just like a Scorpio." It was Stephanie. "Late to your own party."
Elizabeth smiled. "Good thing you were. We couldn't get all the food out in time."
They were all smiling at him. The team. His family.
"You guys…" He stopped.
In the end, this was what mattered. This was what he fought for. Not just flag or country, but for the people in his life. That was what was important.
He looked at Selena. Suddenly, life felt good again.
About the Author
Alex Lukeman is the author of the award-winning Action/Adventure thriller The Tesla Secret. He likes riding old, fast motorcycles, sipping Barbados rum and playing guitar, usually not at the same time
Author's Notes
I like to mix fiction and fact in my stories.
Telluric currents are real, an inexhaustible source of energy with no environmental effects. Nikola Tesla invented alternating current, bladeless turbines and wireless transmission. He patented designs for the transmission of free electrical energy based on the use of the earth's geomagnetic field. We might have that free electricity today if J.P Morgan had not pulled Tesla's funding. It could still be done, which ought to give us all something to think about.
The Mafra Codex does not exist except in my imagination. There are no Mayan books from the period of 500–600 CE. The Mafra Palace in Portugal and it's famous library are real. So is the large and extensive sewer system beneath it.
Zaslon exists. It is composed of the cream of the Russian Special Forces, which makes it a very formidable unit. It is part of Department S of the SVR, which also exists.
Cold launch technology is real. It would allow a missile to be fired from the deck of a freighter lying off our shores. We'd better hope no one does that. A missile fired at the Capitol from close to the Virginia coast would be almost impossible to intercept.
The premise of lost plans for the death ray design is based on fact. Tesla did indeed demonstrate a small device operating in a vacuum, reported in the press as a "Death Ray". Channels exist under the Egyptian pyramids that would have flowed with water before the Nile shifted course. In the Great Pyramid there are no smoke stains from torches on paintings deep inside the structure. What did the builders of the pyramid use for light? Why are the inner walls of the pyramid constructed in such a way that they would serve as a perfect insulator? Why are there illustrations that look exactly like light bulbs of some kind? And why do respected Egyptologists say that the Great Pyramid may not actually have been a tomb after all? If it wasn't a tomb, what was it for?
Tesla saw World War Two coming and made a serious effort to sell his idea for a super weapon to the US and the British governments. Both FDR and Churchill turned him down. Tesla believed his weapon would make war obsolete because of its great destructive power. By this time he was notably eccentric. They didn't believe him. He died in 1943, in poverty and alone, an eccentric old man dismissed as irrelevant and disturbed. Hoover's FBI seized all of his plans, papers, documents and models. These were finally released nine years later and shipped to Serbia. They are in the Tesla Museum in Belgrade.
If he was so irrelevant, why did the FBI grab all his effects?
We can already build futuristic beam weapons, including phasers (just like Star Trek- designs exist which would work perfectly in the vacuum of space), masers and lasers. The US is currently researching and developing a proton beam weapon. I assume the Russians and Chinese are as well. There are still problems, primarily with the power issue described in the story. All beam weapons must confront "blooming" and overcome the resistance of the atmosphere, if they are to be effective as weapons of war.
The Russians did invest a great deal of effort during the 50s and 60s at the Semipalatinsk-21 test site in Kazakhstan trying to develop a proton beam weapon. The theory behind such a weapon is well understood. Tesla's death ray is a developing reality. Imagine something that could make the atomic structure of a target destabilize. It is only a question of time until the obstacles are overcome.