Kurt took a sip of the coffee and glanced out the bridge windows into the deepening gloom. He couldn’t help but wonder which direction that punch might come from.
Eighty-six miles behind the Orion, a different kind of vessel loomed out in the darkness. From all appearances, the MV Rama was a containership. A check of her logs and cargo would prove that she spent most of her time transporting goods from Vietnam to Australia and back. In fact, she’d been fully loaded with electronics and only hours from Perth when Dmitry Yevchenko had bought her, lock, stock, and barrel, and diverted her to the south, turning her into a floating command ship for Anton Gregorovich and the commandos the Russian government had put at his disposal.
The Rama was smaller than most containerships of the day, only five hundred and sixty feet at a time when seven-hundred- and eight-hundred-footers were rapidly being dwarfed by thousand-foot behemoths. But what she did not have in size, she made up for in speed, with a top rate of twenty-eight knots.
As Gregorovich gazed at a satellite feed downloaded to them from a Russian satellite, he was thankful for that choice. The Americans had been racing south at nearly thirty knots since the moment Gregorovich had found them.
“Why are we following them?” a man with a heavily bandaged face asked.
“Because you failed to capture the woman,” Gregorovich said.
“We have helicopters and jamming equipment,” Victor Kirov replied. “And twenty trained commandos on board. We could take her now with ease.”
Gregorovich didn’t like having official Russian agents on his team, or even the Red Army commandos they’d sent him, but at least he could trust the soldiers. With an ambitious GRU man like Kirov, that was not possible.
“You’re lucky I allowed you to come aboard, Victor. You’ve lost face with me in more ways than one.”
Kirov bristled at the comment but didn’t respond.
“Don’t you see?” Gregorovich asked. “The Americans know something. They wouldn’t be driving through the waves at flank speed if they didn’t. They are the hounds chasing the fox. We are the hunters on horseback. At this point, it’s best to shadow them from a distance, using the satellite granted us by the Kremlin to keep an eye on them from over the horizon. When they settle on a final location, we’ll act.”
Kirov snorted and shook his head. “If Thero proves to have a workable weapon, the Americans will swarm here like a horde of angry bees. Our little force will be no match for them. We must find him and destroy or take what he is building before he tests it in a way that alerts the world.”
“Take it?” Gregorovich said. “So we have alternate plans now?”
“If some of the technology can be recovered, we are to do so,” Kirov noted.
“Those were not my orders,” Gregorovich said.
“They’re mine,” Kirov replied.
This was odd, Gregorovich thought, but not totally unexpected. He shrugged it off, more concerned with the fact that he hadn’t been told than the actual task.
“And what are we to do with the little toy you brought along?” He nodded toward a case secured to the far bulkhead. A nuclear warhead lay inside. A suitcase bomb. The mother of all suitcase bombs, really.
The Russian designation was RA-117H. While most tactical warheads yield a few kilotons at best — enough to vaporize several city blocks and perhaps devastate a square mile or so — the RA-117H yielded far more. Nearly three times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
“Once we have samples of the technology, we are to activate the weapon and obliterate the site. There are to be no remnants of Thero or his experiments this time.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Maxmillian Thero walked past a line of his engineers and technicians, a group of misfits he’d molded into a production team. Among them was a North Korean who’d escaped Kim Jong-il, an Iranian couple who’d fallen under suspicion of the radical Ahmadinejad government when their efforts in building his bomb were sabotaged by an American or Israeli computer virus, a Pakistani scientist wanted by Interpol for selling nuclear secrets, a middle-aged German woman whose radical thoughts made her persona non grata in her homeland, and a youth from Chechnya who was brilliant beyond his years but who’d been forced into hiding under the threat of a death sentence for killing Russian soldiers.
In a way, they were his children, Thero mused. But only in a way.
A mixture of fear, promises, and lack of other options kept them at his side, working like devout believers.
“You are the lost sheep whom I’ve gathered beneath my wings,” Thero said, the arrogance in his baritone voice echoing in the semidarkened control room. “Together, we shall witness the fruits of our labor. The brilliance of my genius.”
He moved to a control panel and flipped a series of switches. Lights came on around them, and a suite of computer monitors lit up. Beyond the panels lay a large Plexiglas window. On the other side, a great cavern was illuminated. Perfectly spherical, it stretched nearly five hundred feet from the polished stone floor to the curved, domelike roof. Much of it was natural, but Thero’s believers and his slaves had worked it into the shape of a perfect sphere.
Inside the sphere sat a mechanical orb, made of metal pipes and scaffolding. It resembled a monstrous gyroscope, and, in a sense, it could act as one, pivoting in any and all directions.
This was Thero’s weapon, the ultimate expression of his genius. With it, he could direct vast amounts of energy toward any point on Earth. But, unlike most weapons, Thero’s would not rain destruction down from above. It would send it surging up from below.
By disturbing the zero-point energy contained within the Earth, Thero could channel this energy through the heart of the globe if he chose to.
One by one, a bank of indicator lights went green.
“All systems go,” announced the Chechen.
“Set for minimal power draw,” Thero said.
The engineers busied themselves with Thero’s protocol. They went through checklists and procedures and soon came to the point of no return.
“Switching from geothermal input,” the German woman said. The lights dimmed for a second and then returned to full brightness.
“Initiating the priming sequence,” the Iranian man said.
Several seconds later, a flashing icon on the panel in front of Thero indicated the priming was complete. The moment of truth beckoned. Thero pressed the ignition switch.
The lights dimmed again, much lower this time. Several went dark. The immense power draw of the ignition sequence was straining the electrical grid.
On a screen placed above the viewport a flat line was displayed. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the line began to oscillate as a shallow wave pattern ran across the screen over and over.
Out in the cavern, a dim specter of ethereal light spiraled along the tubing and around the interior of the globe-shaped room. It flashed and faded. A second pulse of energy followed. But, unlike the first, this one remained, moving back and forth like a ghost trapped in some kind of man-made purgatory.
“Magnetic containment field holding,” the Iranian woman said.
Slowly, the lights around them came back up.
“We are now running on zero-point energy,” the German woman said proudly.
As the sounds of subdued celebration spread throughout the room, Thero watched the monitor ahead of him. The peaks and troughs of the wave continued to build until a yellow indicator began to flash.
“Something’s wrong,” the young Chechen said. He returned to his desk. “The pattern is unstable.”
“It can’t be,” someone else insisted.
“Look for yourself.”
Thero stepped over to the panel and studied the three-dimensional pattern. It should have been a perfect sphere like the cave, but it was distorted in one section near the top. The lines pulled to the side, snapped back, and pulled again, like the picture on an old television getting bad reception.