by John Case
“Yeah, well, I’m doing my best,” Burke said, thinking This is insane.
Once he told Kovalenko what he’d learned, that a crazy ex-con from Stanford was planning to do God knows what with a 100-year-old “invention” that never worked in the first place – or never worked properly – it was all over.
However you looked at it, Thomas Aherne & Associates would not be reopening anytime soon.
“Best is not good enough,” Ceplak said. The expression in the old man’s eyes was grave. “Tunguska was half million acres in Siberia. Pine trees, reindeer, a few nomads. But …” His voice trailed away.
“But what?” Burke asked.
“I’m asking you: How big is Manhattan?”
Thirty
Juniper, Nevada | April 29, 2005
WILSON FOUND IT on the Internet, two weeks after he arrived in the States from Liechtenstein.
“A little piece of Paradise,” the B-Lazy-B was embedded in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, a discontinuous conglomerate of California and Nevada lands, comprising a vast wilderness of mountains and deserts, forests and meadows.
The ranch – its emblem consisting of one “B” standing at attention, and the second “B” snoozing on its back – had been created as a religious retreat in 1921. A back-to-nature movement had captured the imagination of Americans, who were beginning to question the direction in which industrialization was leading them. The wilderness was suddenly seen as a place where spiritual and physical renewal might be found.
With its big main house and a dozen spartan cabins, it had housed generations of Baptists on retreat. All was well until the 1940s, when the sect’s accounts were looted by an evangelist with a green eyeshade, who then disappeared in the direction of Brazil. The bank foreclosed, and the retreat was sold to a Russian émigré, who’d always dreamed of owning a dude ranch.
With the dudes came electricity, and against all odds, both the ranch and the émigré prospered for years. A fifteen-hundred-watt diesel generator was brought in to eliminate the inconvenience of frequent power outages. To accommodate the generator and provide for the ranch’s use in winter, underground storage tanks were installed to hold fuel and propane.
Eventually, the émigré suffered a midlife crisis, and decamped for Key West.
Soon afterward, the B-Lazy-B was sold to a dotcom mogul, who spent a small fortune refitting the rustic main house with Arts & Craft fixtures, Sub-Zero appliances, and a Viking stove. A tennis court was put in next to the bunkhouse, which now sported Poggenpohl cabinets and a glass-and-marble shower. Even the hot springs were gussied up, transformed from a single bubbling pool to a stone-lined spa, consisting of three smaller pools whose temperatures ranged from cool to very hot.
Once again, all was well until the NASDAQ crashed in 2001. Suddenly incompatible, the mogul and his much younger wife parted ways, and the ranch went up for sale. Unhappily for the mogul, it did not prove to be an easy sell. The dudes and the Baptists were long gone, as were a lot of millionaires who might have been interested in the ranch as a “collectible.”
In their absence, the B-Lazy-B came to be seen for what it was – which was “almost impossible to get to.” Though it had a helipad, it did not have a runway. To reach it, one needed a helicopter, a horse, or an off-road pickup truck with two spare tires and a winch. Even then, you really had to want to get there. From the nearest town, the B-Lazy-B was a bone-rattling forty-five-mile journey over dirt roads that twisted through the middle of nowhere to the far edge of that same place.
The ranch remained on the block for nearly two years, its asking price dwindling from four to three to two million dollars. Eventually, Wilson bought it for a million-six, putting ten percent down and arranging a mortgage with the same bank that held his shares of Roche.
No sooner was the ink dry on the contract than he began to lay in supplies, including enough propane to keep him warm for years, and enough diesel to run the generators – a collection of models, all built before 1975 – nonstop until the Rapture. An air cargo company, based in Sparks, delivered most of what he needed, including massive spools of electrical cable and bundles of iron rebar.
Not surprisingly, people began to talk. Specifically, they began to talk in the Bucket of Blood Saloon “in nearby Juniper,” some sixty-three miles away. Seated around a card table playing Hold ’Em, a posse of locals chased shots of whiskey with glasses of beer. An aging hippie prospector, who called himself “the Bat,” was the first to raise the issue: “Whut the fuck’s he doin’ up there?”
The cowboy in the next chair, who happened to be a fan of singer Tom Waits, grinned. “Yeah, what’s he building up there?” The allusion went unnoticed.
Standing at the bar, a Ufologist named Vaughn Stein, who’d driven down from Provo looking for what he called “Area 52,” chuckled knowingly. “I heard he’s one of them dudes that stares at goats.”
The Bat frowned. “Say whut?”
“At Fort Bragg?” the Ufologist said. “They kill goats, just by starin’ at ’em.”
Groans of skepticism rose up.
In a corner of the saloon, a fertilizer salesman called “Pilgrim” was feeding quarters into a slot, and pulling away at the arm. “Bullshit!” he cried, without turning his head or breaking his rhythm. “If that guy’s doing anything, he’s mining. Probably found himself a lode of silver –”
“Or uranium,” the Bat suggested. “What I hear –”
“You don’t hear shit,” said the bartender, pouring himself a shot of Drambuie. “His name’s Wilson, and he isn’t doing any mining.”
The card players turned. When the bartender talked, they listened. He was a sensitive man who sometimes closed early if he sensed that people were ignoring him.
“Well, if he’s not mining, what’s he up to?” the Bat demanded.
The bartender smacked his lips. “Well,” he said, “he’s like, an eccentric.”
The Bat gave him a raspberry, as if to say, Tell us something we don’t know.
“Got himself some vintage motorcycles,” the bartender went on. “Couple of Indians … one of them Norton Shadows.”
“That’s a hobby,” the Ufologist declared. “That doesn’t tell us what he’s doing!”
The bartender looked at him. “Ain’t no secret,” he announced. “He’s stargazing.”
Pilgrim froze. With an exaggerated look of incomprehension, he turned from the one-armed bandit and said, “He’s what?”
The bartender rubbed the bar in front of him with a dirty cloth. After a moment, he looked up. “I was talkin’ to Chopper Charley? Down in Sparks?”
“The helicopter guy,” said the Bat.
“Right,” said the bartender.
“He’s crazy as shit,” von Stein laughed.
“Be that as it may,” the bartender told them, “he tells me he’s flyin’ in all kinds of crap to that ranch.”
“Like what?” the Ufologist asked, his voice thick with suspicion.
“Rebar, springs –”
“Springs?” Pilgrim asked. “You mean like … spring springs?”
The bartender nodded. “Big ones. Industrial ones, size of fifty-five-gallon cans.”
“What the fuck’s he gonna do with that?” the Bat demanded.
“I already told you,” the bartender replied. “It’s for stargazin’.” By now, his customers were staring at him. None of them knew what he was talking about, which was just the way he liked it. Finally, the bartender heaved a sigh, and explained: “That’s why he’s out here.” With a nod toward the ceiling, which was yellow with the accreted smoke of a million cigarettes, he said, “No light pollution. On account of we’re so remote.”
“But –”
“He’s gettin’ a telescope. Told Charley all about it. Not some rinky-dink job, like you’d use for peepin’. This thing’s some kinda Wernher Von Braun model. Got a forty-inch mirror, or somethin’.”
“What are you talking about?” the Ufologist complained.
“And what’s any of that got to do with springs?” the Bat asked.
The bartender sighed for a second time, letting them know that their obtuseness was trying his genius – and his patience. “If you’re lookin’ at stars and galaxies and shit, you gotta have a stable foundation, or you ain’t gonna see fuck-all. Any kinda disturbance – I don’t care if a truck goes by or a mouse farts – that’s it! Whatever you were lookin’ at, you lost it! One second you’re starin’ at the Big Dipper, then the mouse cuts loose and you’re lost in space, my friend. Lost. In. Space! Scope’s shaking all over the place.”
“I still don’t know what the springs are for,” the Bat said, sounding exasperated.
The bartender shook his head. His customers were the cross he bore. “Let me spell it out for you,” he told them. “He’s jackin’ up the lookout tower, and puttin’ it on springs. So there’s no vibration. It’s like a private observatory.”
The Ufologist’s eyes dilated with excitement. “I knew it! It’s like the embassy in Moscow! The spooks got a special room there. Put it on springs? That way, no one can eavesdrop on them.” He paused. “Well, they can,” he said, “but they can’t hear anything. On account of there’s no vibration. This guy, Wilson, he’s probably some kind of spook himself.”
The poker players looked at one other, eyebrows raised.
The bartender lifted his glass. “Klaatu verada nikto, my man.”
It was a busy time for Wilson.
On a weekend trip into Reno, he put together a work crew of Mexican migrants, day laborers who waited with others each morning in the parking lot outside a 7-Eleven, making themselves available for work. There were four of them, and they didn’t mind living in the wilderness for a few weeks, if the pay was right. And it was.
Meanwhile, he bought short-term supplies for himself, and a lot of things for the future: tires and seeds and freeze-dried foods. Tools and deep-cycle batteries, clothing, books, and staples. Flour, rice, and redundant systems for purifying water.
Outside the Busted Flush Casino, he found a whore pacing back and forth on the street corner. She was asking fifty bucks for a trick, but he gave her a hundred to introduce him to “a writing doctor.” Two hours later, he had prescriptions for Percocet and Cipro, Valium, and half a dozen other drugs. Anything else he needed, he could buy over-the-counter.
What he couldn’t bring in by truck was delivered by helicopter. Beside the cable, rebar, and storage tanks, he flew in a truckload of lumber, along with a pile of solar panels that might come in handy someday.
Guns were a bigger challenge. Because of his felony conviction, the Guns “R” Us store in Reno was out. But this was more of an inconvenience than a deal breaker. He found an over-and-under shotgun, a Glock, and a Beretta at a Sunday-morning gun show in the Yerington High School gym. Even better, a classified ad in the Pahrump Valley Times offered an Ingram submachine gun (“barely used”). He didn’t hesitate. These few weapons should be enough, he thought, to keep intruders at bay in the early days. After that, it wouldn’t matter.
As for the house, he had a check-off list. Before the day he had to cut it off from the grid and make certain that his collection of generators were not even close to anything that might carry a charge.
The most important aspect of the B-Lazy-B, aside from its remoteness, was its proximity to a fire-lookout tower built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. Nine out of ten such towers had been torn down over the years, but in the late 1990s, preservationists acted to save the ones still standing. A lot of them had been restored and were actually available for rent – although only the adventurous were likely to be interested. Most lacked plumbing and running water, and staying in one was like staying in a lighthouse. You had to enjoy stairs.
Half a mile from the ranch house, Little Mount Baker Outlook was one of the last towers on the restoration list. Unlike some of the other towers, the cab atop Little Mount Baker had no amenities. Those who’d manned it had stayed in a wooden cabin (now tumbled down), a hundred yards away.
It was a world apart from the structure that Tesla had built at Wardenclyffe with J. P. Morgan’s money. But at an elevation of seventy-two hundred feet, it had clear sightlines in every direction, and was almost perfectly suited to Wilson’s purposes.
The weapon, as Wilson thought of it, wasn’t a problem in and of itself. Tesla had built something very much like it more than a hundred years ago, and he hadn’t had the Internet to help him. In effect, the Serb had had to invent or build from scratch what Wilson could buy with the click of a mouse from an electronics warehouse in Canada.
The problem was the lookout tower.
For the tower to serve its purpose, three things were necessary. At Wardenclyffe, Tesla had sunk a blade of metal 128 feet into the earth to capture the “standing waves” of electricity that he needed for the magnifying transmitter. Wilson accomplished the same end with the help of a one-man show known as the Black Mountain Drilling Company.
Against the advice of its proprietor, Wilson suggested that he drill for water at a site directly beside the tower. The well man objected. “There ain’t no water there,” he said, “or if there is, it’s deep. And it’s under a whole lot of ledge. Why don’t we just –”
Wilson insisted. It was his money.
The well man complied. Over the course of a week, he broke five bits, cursing explosively each time. Wilson was terrified that he was about to strike water, and let him go as soon as he reached 130 feet. “I gotta rethink this,” Wilson explained, paying him generously for his time and effort and all the broken bits.
With the shaft bored, Wilson arranged delivery of a truckload of custom-forged iron rods, each five feet long and four inches thick. One by one, he and the work crew lowered the rods into the recently bored hole, using gravity to create the conductive metal shaft that he required.
This done, Wilson supervised the Mexicans in spooling the cable from the generator to the base of the tower, half a mile away.
The third task was hardest of all. The tower – and, in particular, the cab at the top – had to be stabilized. This is where Tesla had an advantage. Stanford White was one of the great architects of his time. Taking Tesla at his word when the inventor insisted that the structure must be steady as a rock, White designed the Wardenclyffe tower in such a way as to make it as stable as an observatory.
Like Philippe Petit, the French aerialist who walked a wire between the World Trade Centers in 1974, White understood the problems of torsion and sway. As did Wilson. Any motion at all would derange the beam.
Like the dome on the Wardenclyffe tower, the cabin atop Wilson’s lookout rested on an open framework. With the Mexicans doing the heavy lifting, Wilson reinforced the framework with I-beams made of steel, and installed pressure transducers. Hooked up to a computer, the transducers tracked changes in pressure in the tower’s framework. This allowed Wilson to pinpoint the places for damping mechanisms. Tuned to the resonant frequency of the tower, the dampers went a long way toward stabilizing the structure under the cabin.
To render the cabin itself motionless, Wilson rebuilt it as a “floating room,” reseating the structure on an array of helically shaped compression springs weighing ninety pounds each. Like the iron rods, the springs were custom-made. With the dampers in place, the cabin was, for all intents and purposes, independently suspended within the framework of the tower.
The Mexicans had no idea what he was up to, nor did they care. They thought he was loco, and that was fine with Wilson. When the work was done, he paid them off in cash, and bought them tickets to L.A. The farther they were from the ranch, the better he liked it.
The one person who worried him was the helicopter pilot. A ponytailed Vietnam veteran with the gray teeth of a meth addict, Chopper Charley was as necessary as his curiosity was worrisome. “Whatcha gonna do with that?” “Damn! that’s a lot of cable.” “Lookit them springs! Why d
o you need …?”
Wilson thought about arranging an accident. It wouldn’t be hard, but he hesitated to do it. Even the most transparent “accident” would attract attention. The police would come to the ranch, asking questions, and almost anything could happen after that.
The solution came to Wilson one night when he was sitting on the porch of the main house, looking up at the stars, and thinking about Irina. The next day, he ordered a twelve-inch refractor telescope from a company in Texas, and arranged for Chopper Charley to deliver it. They unpacked the scope together, and the pilot was suitably impressed by Wilson’s eccentric intent. And he was delighted when Wilson promised to invite him to “a star-party, just as soon as I get the tower stabilized.”
Meanwhile, he set about building the weapons. The big one had been trucked in pieces to the lookout tower and hoisted up to the platform before he could even begin to assemble it. It was coming along, and its smaller mobile counterpart was actually ready.
The portable weapon was needed for tests, to ensure that he’d solved Tesla’s focusing problems. Just like the large one, the weapon itself had posed no challenges. Again, the issue was vibration and stability, providing it with a suitable base.
Toward this end, he bought a Cadillac Escalade (the pickup version, with the shortbed) and installed an array of special shock absorbers and damping mechanisms. The changes made the truck even heavier, so that it handled like a pig. But it worked well enough for his purposes.
Although the online topo maps were helpful, target selection was a problem that couldn’t really be solved until he went to the sites with a GPS. He’d purchased a Garmin watch for just that purpose. It had a built-in GPS system, so he could take readings unobtrusively.
He had a hierarchy of “small targets,” headed by Joe Sozio, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California. But he didn’t want to start with them. That would be like eating dessert before the main course.
The Patent Office was an obvious candidate for his tests, but the impact of the exercise might not be widely reported. The Patent Office was a bit like a tree falling in the forest. If nobody saw it fall and nobody heard it, what was the point? The New York Stock Exchange was a better choice in terms of impact, but its location was problematical. The sightlines would be terrible. Ditto the chances of getting away in the traffic.
