Zero Hour nf-11

by Clive Cussler

  Kurt closed the door.

  Bradshaw turned his head. His eyes were dark, sunken, and half closed.

  “Glad to see you,” Kurt said. “Thought I was about to get hooked up to the power grid for a moment.”

  Bradshaw’s eyes crinkled a bit, the closest he could come to a smile. He stretched for the switch that controlled the hospital bed, but he couldn’t reach it.

  “Prop me up, will ya?”

  Kurt found the button that raised the back of the bed and pressed it, holding it down until Bradshaw was almost in a sitting position.

  An alarm began to flash on the monitor for a second, indicating Bradshaw’s pulse had dropped into the fifties and that his pressure was a little low.

  “That’s what happens when you lose half your blood,” Bradshaw said. “They’ve been pumping it back in all night.”

  “Surprised you had any left to begin with,” Kurt said.

  “I’m a heartless bastard,” Bradshaw insisted. “We don’t require much.”

  “Lucky for you.”

  “I made them take me off the painkillers,” the ASIO chief went on to explain, “so I could talk to you clearly. First, I want to thank you for being the type of idiot who doesn’t know when to quit. I reckon that Hayley, Wiggins, and I all owe you our lives.”

  Kurt appreciated the sentiment. “There’s a rugby match I’ve been wanting to see. Get me good seats, and we’ll call it even.”

  Bradshaw laughed a little, but it made him cough. “The other night, after you intervened at the Opera House, I almost asked you to help out. I had a feeling about you. But once you mentioned the decompression sickness, I was able to put the puzzle together, so I let it go. Good thing I did or you’d have been right alongside us when we got hit. And then we’d all be dead.”

  “A bit of luck,” Kurt noted.

  “Seems so,” Bradshaw agreed. “I hope there’s more where that came from. I don’t have enough wind to beat around the bush, so I’ll just say it straight. I want you to take over the investigation.”

  Kurt’s eyes narrowed.

  “You guessed right,” Bradshaw explained, “I have a leak in my department. I don’t know how it’s possible, but it’s the only logical explanation. Despite my efforts, someone seems to know what we’re doing almost before we do. They’re batting a perfect record at beating us to the punch.”

  “Is that why we’re here on the air base instead of in a civilian hospital?”

  “That’s exactly the reason,” Bradshaw said. “My men are being told I’m still in surgery, and then they’ll hear that I haven’t regained consciousness. Aside from Wiggins and Hayley — who are temporarily being held in solitary like you and Zavala — no one is being informed of your presence or interference.”

  “These things have a way of leaking out,” Kurt noted, “especially if we start poking around asking questions. Which, considering that we’re Americans, might be a little tricky down here on Australian soil.”

  “It would be tricky,” Bradshaw agreed, “if you were staying on Australian soil.”

  Kurt leaned against a desk. “What are you saying?”

  “We’re dealing with terrorists here,” Bradshaw replied. “We believe the next phase of their plan will be launched from somewhere offshore.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Our informant,” Bradshaw said. “We’ve been told the project in the outback has been superseded by a larger, more dangerous plan. Evidence bears that out. Considering the effort it must have taken to build and hide that lab — or whatever you might call it — it’s completely irrational to blow it up unless you have something else to fall back on.”

  Kurt nodded. It made sense to him.

  “In addition to that,” Bradshaw added, “the shipment of mining equipment we intercepted was some of the latest self-contained, oceangoing gear available. It’s designed for use in the most hazardous environments and the worst weather. We plucked it off a freighter that left Perth and was officially bound for Cape Town, but the ship’s track was southbound, toward Antarctic waters, not west to South Africa.”

  “There’s no accounting for bad navigation these days,” Kurt joked. “Where do you think they were headed?”

  “We think Thero is hiding on the Antarctic shelf.”

  “Thero?”

  “The leader of this mess.”

  Kurt pulled up a chair, swung it around, and sat down with his arms resting on the back, leaning toward Bradshaw. He considered what the man was asking. His own curiosity spurred him on, but there were bigger issues.

  “NUMA is not exactly a law enforcement agency. Maybe you want to contact Interpol.”

  “And wait six months for the paperwork to clear?”

  Bradshaw shook his head in answer to his own question. “Besides,” he added, “this is a science problem as much as it is a terrorist threat. From what I’ve heard, you NUMA guys seem to specialize in that combination. And if they’re using the ocean as cover… well, that’s right up your alley, isn’t it?”

  Kurt nodded. “It is.”

  “Then let me pass the baton.”

  “It’s not my call,” Kurt explained. “All this… our involvement… It was just me being an idiot, like you said. But if we’re going to involve NUMA officially, I have to run it up the flagpole. I can’t promise you anything. But from what you’ve told me, I think our Director will see it your way.”

  “Pitt?” Bradshaw said. “Yeah, I’ve heard of him. Sounds like a good man.”

  “The best,” Kurt said. “But before I go to him, I have to know exactly what we’re dealing with. What are these people up to? Who is this guy Thero and what does he want?”

  Bradshaw didn’t hesitate. He’d brought Kurt here to talk and he was ready. “Have you ever heard of zero-point energy?”

  Truth was, Kurt hadn’t. At least not until he’d done the Internet search on Hayley Anderson.

  “I saw the term on a scientific paper,” he admitted. “Can’t say I read more than a paragraph or two, but it sounded like some type of power source.”

  “I won’t pretend to understand the physics,” Bradshaw said, “but the concept involves drawing energy from background fields that are supposedly all around us. As the theory goes, tapping into these fields would provide an unlimited and inexhaustible source of energy for the whole world, one that would cost almost nothing to use and distribute.”

  “Sounds like a pipe dream,” Kurt said.

  “Maybe it is,” Bradshaw said. “Who knows? But this group we’re dealing with believes in it. They claim they’ve unlocked its secret.”

  Bully for them, Kurt thought. “How does that turn into what we saw today? If free energy is all about peace, love, and kilowatts, why are people getting shot and blown up?”

  Bradshaw coughed and winced in pain. “I’ll give you a file with everything we think we know, but here’s the short version. As I told you, it starts with a guy named Thero, Maxmillian Thero. He’s an American, actually. A nuclear engineer by trade and a self-taught physicist. He spent eight years in your navy, working on submarines and aircraft carriers. He was discharged in 1978 and began work at Three Mile Island a few months before the meltdown in 1979.”

  “Great timing,” Kurt noted.

  “It was for him, apparently. Feeling like the world had narrowly avoided an epic disaster, he began to rethink his career choice. He bounced around a lot and eventually launched a crusade to find an alternate system of generating power. At some point, he hit on the idea of zero-point energy. As near as we can tell, he spent years trying to get funding and prove the concept was workable. Unfortunately, he was never taken seriously.

  “After a while, he came to believe there was a sinister reason for this, that his efforts were being thwarted by big shots in the nuclear industry, the oil companies, and other power brokers in your Energy Department. He claimed in an interview that your government had tapped his phone lines and bugged his home and his laboratory. An IRS investi
gation into his funding only added fuel to the fire.”

  “Sounds like a persecution complex.”

  “A CIA profile your government shared with us concluded exactly that. He’s a paranoid bugger. That seems to be what drives him. Shortly after Y2K, he fled the U.S. and came to Australia.”

  “Why Australia?” Kurt asked. “From what I recall, you guys don’t even use nuclear power.”

  “We don’t,” Bradshaw said. “And that’s exactly why he came here. He figured that would level the playing field. That, along with the fact that Australia and New Zealand were pushing back against visits by American nuclear warships. From what I understand, he seemed to think my government would embrace him.”

  “Did they?”

  “At first,” Bradshaw said. “He received the first real grant he’d ever seen and found work as a professor at the University of Sydney, while trying to perfect his theory. By ’05 he claimed he was only a year away from a workable system. But before he could run his big test, my government got involved and shut him down.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no answer to that,” Bradshaw said, “but there were people who thought his experiments were dangerous.”

  That really wasn’t a surprise. Paranoid nuclear scientists doing unregulated trials in the dark tended to make people nervous.

  “How does Hayley fit into all this?”

  “She’s a physicist. She was a grad student when Thero arrived. She worked with him the entire time he was here. Hayley, along with Thero’s son, George, and his daughter, Tessa, all of whom were physicists, formed a tight little triangle looking up to Thero.”

  “All part of the crusade,” Kurt guessed.

  “True believers.”

  “So you guys shut him down eight years ago,” Kurt noted. “Somehow, I’m guessing that’s not the end of his story.”

  “It’s not. Thero and his family were ordered to leave the country or be deported. They might have gone back to the U.S., but a Japanese venture capitalist named Tokada gave him a lifeline. As near as we can tell, Tokada promised that Japan, unlike your country or mine, would support his work.”

  “Makes sense,” Kurt said. “Japan has always been dependent on imported energy.”

  “Massively dependent,” Bradshaw said. “They import ninety-eight percent of their oil and ninety percent of their coal. Their nuclear industry is pretty large, but because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear power has always been a sore spot, even before the tsunami wiped out those reactors on the coast.”

  Kurt could see the dominoes lining up. “So if Thero could tap into this zero-point energy, Japan could do away with all of that, and the whole country would hail him as a hero and probably make him a billionaire overnight.”

  Bradshaw nodded again. “Thero moved there in ’06, setting up shop in a secret laboratory on a small island in the north known as Yagishiri. His son and daughter went with him. Hayley stayed behind.”

  “Why?”

  Bradshaw tried to make himself more comfortable, pulling at a pillow. “Well, for one thing, she’d begun to think they were headed down a dangerous path. Beyond that, she suffers from a debilitating fear of travel. She doesn’t fly, doesn’t even own a car. She mostly walks or takes the train. Until yesterday, she hadn’t been out of Sydney for nine years.”

  That surprised Kurt, considering the bravery he’d seen in her.

  “How’d you get her out here?”

  “Sedatives.”

  Kurt laughed.

  Bradshaw coughed again and cleared his throat. “Two years after Thero went to Japan, there was an incident, a massive explosion on Yagishiri. His lab was completely obliterated.”

  “What happened?”

  “No one knows for sure. Some say his experiments literally blew up in his face. Satellite photos showed nothing left but a smoking hole in the ground. It seemed impossible that anyone could have survived. Funerals were held for everyone believed to be present, including Thero and his children.”

  “Case closed,” Kurt said. “A little too easy.”

  “Yeah,” Bradshaw agreed. “Fast-forward to last year, and my government received a letter, claiming to be from Thero. It insists he’s come for revenge and that he intends to tear Australia apart, the way his family was torn apart.”

  Kurt sat back. “Tear Australia apart? As in create chaos, social upheaval, or something like that?”

  Bradshaw shook his head. “As in rip the continent in two.”

  Kurt studied Bradshaw’s face. There was nothing to suggest he was joking or delusional. “Come again?”

  “That’s where the worm turns,” Bradshaw said. “Like any form of energy, there are beneficial uses and harmful uses for this one. Thero claims he’s finally succeeded in his quest and unlocked the secret to limitless energy. He insists that he would have used it for the benefit of the world, but because the world rejected him and brutalized his children, he’ll now use this newfound power for revenge, beginning by ripping this island in half.”

  “Even with some type of energy source I’ve never heard of, that sounds a little absurd,” Kurt said. “A thousand nuclear bombs couldn’t split Australia in half.”

  “No,” Bradshaw agreed, “but plate tectonics can.”

  “Why don’t you cut to the chase here? What are you telling me?”

  “I’ll let Hayley explain the details, but Thero claims he can use this zero-point energy to unleash earthquakes and affect the movement of continental plates.”

  Kurt had seen a study some years back, suggesting such a thing might be possible on a minor scale. High pressure, deep-well injections of certain chemicals were known to lubricate fault lines and cause minor tremors in places. But for the most part, these were quakes felt only on the readouts of seismic monitors, not in the streets of cities and towns high above.

  Then again, this zero-point energy was like nothing Kurt had ever heard of before.

  “Thero’s already proven it to us,” Bradshaw said. “In the letter detailing his threat, he promised to unleash an earthquake exactly two months from the date of his signature. He insisted it would occur somewhere between Adelaide on the southern coast and Alice Springs, where we are now.”

  “There was an earthquake last month,” Kurt said, recalling the news. “A big one.”

  “Six-point-nine,” Bradshaw said. “One hundred and twenty miles north-northwest of Adelaide. It hit on the exact date Thero promised. Largest quake we’ve had in years.”

  “But there are no fault lines here,” Kurt said, remembering his geology. “Australia sits in the middle of a plate, not on the boundary like California or Japan.”

  “So I’ve been told,” Bradshaw said. “Thero insists he can change all that. That when he’s done, Australia will be cleaved down the middle and there will be, in effect, two smaller plates where there is currently one.”

  Kurt’s mind reeled. Was it really possible?

  “Is there any way it could be coincidence?” he asked. “A lucky guess that just happened to come true? Even an educated prediction based on some new sensing device he created?”

  Bradshaw shrugged. “Even Hayley isn’t sure. But we can’t exactly wait around to find out.”

  No, Kurt thought, there was no way they could do that. Not when they were dealing with a madman looking for poetic justice who’d already lost everything of importance.

  “Why is Hayley still involved?” he asked. “She’s no agent. She sounded like a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown the other night. Why do you have her meeting with these couriers?”

  Bradshaw sighed. “I told you, we have an informant, an unknown person inside Thero’s organization who’s been feeding us data. He or she contacted Hayley out of the blue shortly after the threat first came to light. Whoever this person inside Thero’s organization is, he or she is willing to deal with us only if Hayley acts as the go-between.”

  Kurt could see Bradshaw’s dilemma. “She’s a brave woman,” he said, �
�too brave for her own good. You should put her in protective custody somewhere.”

  “There is no protective custody from what Thero is about to unleash. Not down here anyway. And since she won’t travel, that kind of limits the options. Besides, she wants to keep helping. And if you take this on, you’re going to need her. She’s the only one who understands what we’re really dealing with.”

  Kurt could see that Bradshaw was right, but he didn’t like the idea. Bad things happened to civilians that got tangled up in a mess like this.

  Bradshaw pointed to a sealed manila envelope on the desk. It looked to contain a thick file. “That’s everything we know. Read it, talk to your people, and let me know your decision as soon as you can. You’ll get your rugby tickets either way.”

  Kurt smiled. Bradshaw was a good soul, tough as nails and gutting out the pain so he could pass the torch and yet still able to crack a joke. Kurt figured he deserved some more happy juice so he could fade off to dreamland for a while. The thought reminded him of another mystery.

  “What happened out there?” he asked. “How’d those guys get the drop on you?”

  Bradshaw shook his head. “One minute, I was getting ready to make a radio call. The next thing I know, I was on the ground, and someone was shooting.”

  “Did you see a flash?”

  Bradshaw paused.

  “Like sunlight reflecting off glass?”

  “Yeah,” Bradshaw said slowly. “Yeah, I think I did.”

  Kurt nodded. He was no closer to an answer. But he was pretty sure that whatever happened to Bradshaw had also happened to Joe. Maybe Thero had more than one weapon at his disposal.

  He grabbed the file and stood. “I’ll send the nurse in.”

  “I’ll rest better when I know you’re on the case,” the ASIO chief grunted.

  “Then I’ll let you know as soon as I can.”

  FOURTEEN

  Washington, D.C., 2200 hours

  Under the soft light of antique chandeliers, a crowd of ambassadors, congressmen, and other dignitaries mingled in the East Room of the White House. They spoke quietly, accompanied by the subdued tones of the gilded Steinway piano that graced the room.