The Lightning Stones

by Jack Du Brul

  “Okay, okay. Where are you sending them?” In case his adversaries had access to airline databases, which was likely given their sophistication and reach, Mercer planned to cancel all his flight reservations except the destination Jason had chosen for his ruse. Of the flights he’d arranged under Booker Sykes’s name, he’d keep the two tickets to Fiji.

  “They’ll think the plane went down at a place called Gardner Island. It’s part of the island nation of Kiribati, formerly the Gilberts, of which Tarawa is the most famous. Gardner is more in line with Earhart’s intended course than Futuna, and has the added bonus of being an atoll where people claim they’ve found clues that she did indeed crash.”

  “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.

  Before this new revelation, plans were well under way to use a combination of artificial and genuine stones—d’Avejan had one stone from America and another that had been passed down to him from his great-uncle (who himself had acquired it mysteriously as a young man in the Orient). Professor Jean-Robert Fortescue, a gifted scientist who worked for d’Avejan in Eurodyne’s sophisticated labs, had taken d’Avejan’s sample and figured out how to coax it to grow, which had led to the discovery of the stones’ true potential. Fortescue had synthesized the crystals using a massive press machine that exerted tremendous force, while at the same time heating the seed crystals to 1,000 degrees centigrade. In this hellish place, tiny bits of the original shard were forced to grow once again, adding to themselves the way a lizard regrows a tail. And like the reptile, the new appendage wasn’t quite as good as the original. Fortescue was as eager as d’Avejan to obtain a larger selection of real gems, though for him this was an intellectual exercise rather than a quest for profit.

  Fortescue had already run the numbers twice and had come up with the same location for the lost aviatrix as the one that had been intercepted in Washington. He was a cautious person and never accepted another man’s work if he could do it himself. The measurements of the sample’s electrical properties jibed with his own work, and the assumptions seemed reasonable and in line with what he would have done. But he also knew that a minute deviation from the starting point could have profound implications at the end. Whoever the American had used to do the work had been very, very good. So much so that Fortescue would have welcomed the scientist into his own lab as an assistant.

  Like many academicians, Jean-Robert Fortescue neglected the passage of time when he was engrossed in a problem. He could spend hours working and forget to eat, or entire weekends and forget to shower. His single-mindedness could be off-putting.

  Fortescue had wanted to explore the crystals’ remarkable shielding ability. His initial thought was that the crystal could offer unprecedented protection to microelectronics for nano-scalar circuitry, but soon after Fortescue instead found himself drawn into a geoengineering experiment to try to strengthen Earth’s magnetic field. D’Avejan had told him his work would help avert a global climate catastrophe. Jean-Robert wasn’t so certain about that side of the experiment, but with d’Avejan’s encouragement he was eager to continue.

  Fortescue was in his tenth straight hour of work, having stopped only to relieve pressure in his bladder and force himself to swallow some electrolyte-infused sports drink. He was clicking through the images the American had snapped of the Afghan geode that had yielded the amazing gems. Fortescue had seen the geode already, in a series of photos taken by a Pakistani soldier they’d hired to track the American in the dangerous tribal regions bordering the two countries.

  Fortescue should have missed the anomaly. The inside of the geode was roughly bathtub size, with a honeycomb surface where the accretion matrix had once held the dun-colored crystals. It was intricate—so complex it became featureless, like looking at faces in a crowd. In their multitude they lost their individuality. An earlier computer match of some of the pictures had shown the topography to be identical in both sets of photographs, but somehow, comparing the two side by side on a pair of monitors, Fortescue now noted a difference. As soon as he did he cursed.

  “Oh, you are indeed a clever one,” he said to the empty room. “You were so smart and so good that you even fooled my computers. Ha! You did not fool me.”

  For the next hour, Jean-Robert redid all the work he’d so laboriously produced already, only this time he adjusted his own calculations about the size of the geode. He didn’t understand how a filtering program through which he’d washed the American’s pictures hadn’t detected the difference. The filters analyzed at the bit level, searching for statistical anomalies or signs of infilling, and had found nothing. The technology he was up against was indeed formidable, but sometimes what a computer cannot see, a human can. And after the first hour’s work he knew that the pictures sent to him from Washington, D.C., had been doctored.

  The size—and yield—of the geode had been reduced by 9.681 percent. That’s when Fortescue realized his opponent was making a fool out of him. This was a slap in the face—and Fortescue threw himself into the contest. He ran numbers for another couple of hours, churning simulation after simulation through the mainframe so intensely that the ship’s engineer had detected a spike in the nuclear plant’s output and called to the control center to inquire if everything was all right.

  “Better than all right, Chief, I assure you,” Fortescue said into the phone embedded in his workstation. “But you must excuse me. I need to speak to Monsieur d’Avejan right away.”

  23

  The adjacent islands of Futuna and Alofi crouched low on the horizon, clinging to the line where earth met sky, humpbacked and verdant and about as unspoiled as any place on Earth. The larger, Futuna, was on the left as they approached out of the south, and was separated from its neighbor by a two-mile-deep channel. Alofi was craggier from this vantage, with volcanic cliffs not yet pounded flat by the relentless action of wave and tide, but the rest of the island was reef-lined white sand beaches. The forest canopy covering the island looked primeval, though the captain assured his passengers that there were a handful of small plantations carved into the jungle by Futuna islanders to grow tobacco and taro.

  The boat was a sixty-footer rented out of Fiji, and no amount of money would convince her captain and owner, an expatriate Australian named Rory Reyes, to let his two clients take her on their own. She had a tall fly bridge for fish spotting, a rear dive platform and compressor for recharging scuba tanks, a small Zodiac for trips to shore, and sleeping accommodations for seven. Reyes had his cabin just off the main bridge below the fly tower. Mercer and Book had flipped a coin for the master suite located in the broad V of the bow under the main deck, and the coin had come up in Book’s favor. The second day aboard, Sykes informed Mercer the bed was like a cloud; Mercer told him his was a foam affair stuffed into a box frame that smelled of feet.

  Through a combination of accrued vacation days and some successful lobbying by both Book and his girlfriend Stacy, Sykes had been able to spring himself a week early from his final tour in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor. It had cost him the promise to Stacy that he wouldn’t go back to Kabul, and the assurance that he and Mercer weren’t off to bed native girls in the South Pacific. Stacy liked Mercer, but she didn’t necessarily trust him and Booker together. Freely borrowing Aretha Franklin’s line from the movie The Blues Brothers, she called him Book’s “white hoodlum friend.”

  After successfully staging Jason’s “mugging” in D.C., Mercer and Book had driven down to Sykes’s bungalow near Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where they’d made lists and then refined those lists until they knew exactly what they would need for their trip. The following morning, Book went on a shopping spree, while Mercer’s main task was to get the right kind of charter boat in Fiji. He spent hours on Book’s laptop, and more time on the phone, until he found Captain Rory Reyes of the Suva Surprise, a nice wide-hulled sport fisherman named for Fiji’s capital. The ship was fitted with extended fuel tanks to cover long distances.

  Mercer attempted to rent the boat for himself, but that was a nonstarter and the weathered Aussie insisted he come with them. Reyes was in his late fifties, with bright blue eyes held in creased pouches of skin in a broad friendly face. His handshake had been firm when he’d met them at Nadi International Airport. His accent was pure outback, and he had a good sense of humor and an honest laugh. One of the first things he’d said, though, was that judging by the looks of his latest clients he was glad he hadn’t let them take the boat themselves.

  “Why’s that?” Book asked in an intimidating voice.

  “Because I know trouble when I see it, and you two are it. In fact, if I hadn’t just lost my big summer charter I’d tell yo
u two blokes to get back on the plane for Hawaii and forget you’ve ever heard of ole Capt’n Rory.”

  Reyes had studied them both as they stood in the hot sun outside the terminal building. Book had switched into shorts on the plane, but Mercer was in khakis that were beginning to stick to his legs. “I’m not sure what your game is,” the boat captain said, “but I don’t think it’s archaeology like you said on the phone.”

  “We’re looking for a wrecked plane,” Mercer assured him. “That’s all.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Before they could leave the airport complex, Mercer told Reyes that he had a package waiting in cargo customs. There he signed for a boxed-up duffel bag that had been express-shipped from the United States. The customs inspector made Mercer open the box and duffel so he could verify its contents against the bill of lading. Suspicious or maybe just bored, the Fijian then ran the box through an X-ray scanner, taking nearly a minute to ensure there was nothing suspicious in the grainy image. As stated, the American was picking up eighty pounds of bare copper wire that had been unspooled and repacked in a dense rectangular brick the size of a longish picnic cooler. He forced Mercer to pay a small import duty and sent them on their way. Where the customs man needed an assistant to manhandle the weighty duffel, Book carried it out as easily as if the box were packed with Styrofoam.

  The next morning the three boarded Reyes’s boat. They motored out of Royal Suva Yacht Club and were soon beyond Fiji’s barrier reefs and into the open sea. The Suva Surprise could more than handle the ride. The humidity dropped away from land, and the sun and sea conspired to lull the two jet-lagged passengers to sleep for the first half of their four-hundred-mile trip to Futuna and Alofi.

  When Mercer woke, he noted the seas had picked up slightly. The sun was still shining, but there was an edge to the wind that even a nonsailor like him could tell meant a storm was coming. He went up to the bridge. Rory Reyes sat relaxed at the helm, a liter bottle of water at hand and a half-smoked cigar clamped between large white teeth.