Vulcan's Forge

by Jack Du Brul

  There was only one round in the Makarov semiautomatic pistol, the one round Kerikov had planned to use on himself if the need ever arose. It blew a perfectly round hole through the accountant’s forehead, then splattered the contents of his skull onto the wall and door behind his slumping body.

  Kerikov rummaged through his desk until he found a flimsy cardboard box of ammunition. He loaded one round into the pistol and slipped it back into the drawer. He pressed the intercom button on his black telephone.

  “Yes, Mr. Kerikov,” his secretary answered.

  “There has been a slight change in my plans, Anna.” Kerikov lit another cigarette. “Inform Evad Lurbud that I want him in Cairo as soon as possible; I believe he is still at my dacha. Also, I want you to get me the earliest flight to Bangkok. I’ll travel on the Johann Kreiger passport.”

  “What about the KGB accountant?” Anna asked. Kerikov assumed from her tone that she had heard the shot.

  “He’ll be resting here for a while. As soon as you’ve reached Lurbud and booked my flight, leave the building. When you’re questioned, tell them that you took an early lunch and know nothing. Good luck, Anna. And good-bye.”

  “I understand.” If she was disappointed that their four-year affair was ending, she gave no indication.

  Kerikov took some time going through the secure files in his wall safe, pulling out a select few that might one day prove useful or profitable. He knew after he boarded the flight to Bangkok, he’d never again return to Russia.

  The Pacific

  Valery Borodin bolted upright in his bed, a muffled gasp clutched in the base of his throat. His lean body was slick with nervous sweat, his dark hair plastered to his neat head. His chest heaved and his heart pounded as he fought to regain control of himself.

  It took nearly two minutes to realize he was no longer the frightened six-year-old boy of his dream, being told by faceless uniformed men that his father had died in a laboratory accident. He was a man now, a respected scientist in his own right. Yet the haunting sobs of his mother still lingered in the quiet of his cabin aboard the motor ship August Rose.

  That dream had tortured him since the day those events actually occurred. It woke him most nights, but he had always remained silent, because his mother was grieving in the room next to his in the small Kiev apartment that the Department of Scientific Operations had allowed them to retain as recompense after the accident.

  To Valery, that had been the worst, stifling the scream that always rushed through him, suppressing it, crushing it so he would not disturb his mother. To Russians, grief was something to be worn openly, passionately, yet he could not express it. He did not believe that his pain was worth encroaching on his mother’s. Years later, retelling this story always evoked sympathy from the listener, but never understanding. Somehow he got the feeling that people thought there was something wrong with him, some flaw.

  It wasn’t until last year, in Mozambique, that Valery found someone who finally understood, an American girl who was herself a victim of losing a parent young.

  He swung his legs off the narrow bunk of his private cabin. Had the Soviet government not developed a keen interest in his mind, Valery surely would have found a career in the ballet. There was not an ounce of extra flesh on his frame; muscled plane blended with supple joint in the perfect symmetry that comes not from hours spent in gyms, but the blessing of genetic inheritance.

  He raked his fingers through his hair, pulling it back from his forehead, and at once a thick cowlick sprang up and hung over his right eye.

  The dream which had haunted his childhood had returned just last year in the office of Ivan Kerikov, a man whom Valery had never heard of, but who seemed to know everything about him. Valery learned that this man was the current head of the department that had employed his late father. Kerikov calmly explained that Scientific Operations had watched Valery with interest over the years and in fact helped him along at times. As Valery incredulously tried to digest this piece of information, Kerikov dropped another bombshell.

  He pressed a signal buzzer on his desk and a man walked into the room. Valery barely heard Kerikov introduce Dr. Pytor Borodin. Thirty years had aged his father, filling out his body and silvering his wild hair and beard, but he was still the man who stared from the photograph hanging over the dinner table in his mother’s apartment.

  That night Valery had the dream for the first time since his early teens.

  It wasn’t until their next meeting that Valery had recovered enough to actually listen to the things his father and Kerikov were discussing.

  The elder Borodin had faked his own death so many years ago as a security precaution. His work at the time had been so secret that only such drastic measures would ensure protection. After most of Borodin’s coworkers were summarily executed in the summer of 1963, Borodin had worked alone monitoring his secret project, nurturing it along to its now fast approaching conclusion.

  Kerikov explained that they needed a new staff of scientists to see the project concluded. Would Valery be interested in joining as second-in-command?

  At the time Valery was working for the State Energy Bureau, investigating the potential of Russia’s tremendous methane hydrate reserves, which were locked in the permafrost of western and central Siberia. His background in geology was as strong as any of the new breed of Russian scientists, men and women whose worth was valued by results rather than the ability to regurgitate party dogma.

  Valery only agreed to join after being assured that his consideration was based on his merits, not on the family connection. Pytor Borodin’s casual dismissal of such a notion was terribly painful, as if Borodin wasn’t even acknowledging his own son.

  Two weeks after those early meetings, Valery was given a holiday in Mozambique under the cover of a marine biology mission, a chance to defrost his body after so many months in Siberia and prepare himself for the work ahead.

  Since then, the work had been nothing short of incredible. Kerikov had managed to assemble some of the sharpest minds in the Russian Federation and place at their disposal the latest cutting edge technology.

  Valery pulled on a pair of American denim jeans and a military green T-shirt. It was just past midnight, but he knew trying to go back to sleep would be futile.

  The ship’s galley, one deck below his cabin, was deserted, but a large urn of coffee was kept warm on a side table. Valery filled a white mug and took a cautious sip of the strong, bitter brew. He nodded to the kitchen hand noisily cleaning pans in the scullery before leaving for the nerve center of the August Rose.

  Built as a bulk carrier designated UT-20 by Hitachi-Zosen in 1979, she had been converted to a refrigeration ship in 1983 when she had been bought by Ocean Freight and Cargo. The 1.13 million cubic feet of bulk storage area had been reduced by nearly thirty percent to make room for massive Carrier refrigeration units and the special cargo-handling equipment needed to transport frozen goods.

  That refitting was well documented by the Japanese shipyard that carried out the work, by Continental Insurance, and by the Finnish bank which floated most of the loans held by Ocean Freight and Cargo. The August Rose’s next refit was kept much more secret.

  She spent seven weeks in a secure drydock in Vladivostok in the spring of 1990. Cosmetically she still resembled the vessel she had always been: 20,000 deadweight tons and 497 feet long, with a sharply raked bow and an aft-positioned superstructure that resembled a four-story steel box. But within her steel-plated hull she was transformed into the most unique scientific vessel ever built.

  The cavernous main hold was turned into a geophysics laboratory augmented by smaller labs, offices, and data storage rooms. The refrigeration units were left in place, but now they worked to keep the sophisticated computer system at a constant temperature.

  The computers themselves were huge, taking up nearly two thousand square feet of space for the main-frames and half again as much for the peripherals. There was more computing power aboard the August
Rose than at Baikanor, Russia’s equivalent of Cape Canaveral. Enough cargo space remained for the August Rose to operate under the cover of a refrigerator ship, though she could no longer haul enough frozen goods to ever turn a profit, yet the ruse allowed her to sail the Pacific unimpeded.

  Valery reached the main laboratory through a torturous maze of bulkhead doors and narrow companionways. The final door was secured by a magnetic keycard lock. A guard noted his time of entry on a log sheet and took custody of his card, which would have been erased by the magnetic fields created by the equipment in the lab.

  It was past midnight, but nearly a dozen scientists, technicians, and assistants were at work, monitoring the numerous sensors that hung from two towed arrays beneath the vessel’s keel. A large metal plotting table dominated the center of the room. Above it, on an articulating arm, a holographic laser projector hung down like some monstrous dentist’s drill. Bundles of fiber-optic cables ran from the projector to the mainframe computer and to the table itself.

  Pytor Borodin was seated at the console nearest the projection table, his slim body hidden under a voluminous white lab coat. Valery took a deep breath of the filtered, sterilized air and strode across the rubber-tiled floor.

  “Working late again, Father?”

  He might have been the oldest member of the scientific team by twenty years, but Pytor Borodin kept a pace that far surpassed that of all his staff, including his second-in-command. He usually spent thirty-six hours in the computer room before taking a grudging six-hour break for sleep. His crumpled appearance alarmed his son.

  “Father, have you been taking your medication?”

  “No,” the elder scientist fired back irritably. “That Coumadin is nothing more than rat poison and Vasotec, the beta blocker, affects my breathing because of the air-conditioning. Now don’t bother me again about my heart. Have a look at this; we’ve gotten the cameras back on line.”

  Valery glanced at the monitor and saw a close approximation of hell on earth. Dangling from a Kevlar cable and encased in carbon fiber with a thick artificial sapphire lens cover, the camera hung directly above the central vent of the fastest growing volcano in the world. Molten rock, forced upward by the tremendous heat engine of the earth’s core, poured through the narrow rent in the crust in a never-ending stream, amid billowing clouds of noxious gas and dissolved minerals. There was no microphone attached to the camera, but Valery could almost hear the protesting moans as the earth vomited up her guts.

  “The rate has increased again,” Valery remarked.

  “And?”

  “The flow is forming more westerly now.”

  “Right, it’s caught in the North Equatorial Gyre, just as I’d predicted.”

  “But that current only moves maybe three miles per day. Surely that can’t cause a shift in the formation of the cone.”

  “It wouldn’t normally, no, but the rate of ejection from the volcano is so great that the two forces create a skew in the lava flow. It’s a simple matter of vectors. I’m glad you’re here, Valery, the computer is about finished with the past day’s data and is ready for a growth projection.”

  Because of the massive amount of raw data gathered by the sensors and the inherently chaotic movement of anything within nature’s realm, the August Rose needed huge computers in order to create a reasonable prediction of the volcano’s future growth. Even with the gigabytes of power, the computers needed a full twenty-four hours to remap, down to the millimeter, the thrusting cone below the ship and then to predict where the cone would broach the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

  The countdown clock on one computer screen indicated that the holographic projection would be complete in one minute and twenty seconds. Valery and his father waited in silence, both preferring to stare at the camera images than fake inane conversation. Pytor Borodin didn’t seem to notice the tension between them, but Valery was well aware.

  Finally the counter ran down to zero, and Pytor Borodin activated the holographic imager. The model projected against the plotting table began as just a hazy conical outline, but quickly sharpened. Crags, radiating dikes, and smaller vents were easily distinguished. The projection looked as solid as a plaster cast but was composed entirely of laser beams.

  “Activating the extrapolation logarithms.”

  The computer had already done the tens of billions of calculations necessary to predict the growth of the volcano, so the image began to change immediately. A shimmering blue plane representing the ocean’s surface appeared and the volcano quickly rose through it, tiny simulated waves pounding against the bleak basalt shores.

  Borodin pressed several more buttons on his console and longitude and latitude lines were added to the projection, accurate to the second of a degree.

  With a note of satisfaction, Pytor Borodin remarked, “This is the third straight test where the summit has broached more than a thousand meters outside of Hawaii’s two-hundred-mile exclusionary limit. I think it is now time to inform Kerikov.” He turned to a female assistant. “Tell the captain that I wish us to remain on the site for an additional twenty-four hours.”

  She nearly bowed as she left the lab. Borodin strode back to his console and called to the room at large, “Reset the sensors and the computers. I want to run another simulation immediately.”

  Just as Valery turned to go, his father grabbed him lightly by the arm. “You have yet to see the latest from the gas spectrometry lab.”

  The two left the lab together, Borodin’s hand still on his son’s arm, as if he expected him to bolt at any moment.

  The spectrometry lab was crammed with gleaming stainless steel equipment and several computer monitors slaved to the mainframe. The gas spectrometer itself was as large as an automobile, but infinitely more complex. It used the spectrum of light given off by vaporized material to decode its chemical composition. The system was also paired with a seismic wave echo sounder as a backup.

  “Vassily, show our second-in-command what you showed me earlier this evening.” Borodin never called Valery his son.

  The sheets of paper the scientist thrust into Valery’s hands were covered in bands of rainbow hues broken up by black lines of varying thicknesses. The lines corresponded to the wavelengths of light absorbed by the vaporized materials.

  As easily as a geographer deciphering the myriad lines on a topographical map, Valery leafed through pages, noting no deviations from the normal composition of asthenospheric magma, until he came to the last set of spectrographic images.

  He recognized the lines denoting basalt, silica, and ferro-magnesium, but there was also a series of conspicuous lines indicating the presence of vanadium, and next to that, a jumble of alternating thick and thin lines that he had never seen before.

  “The earliest writings on alchemy date from the mid-fifth century and have been found in Arab and Chinese codices as well as European,” Pytor Borodin said softly, looking over his son’s shoulder at the printout. “For the following twelve centuries, alchemists represented the best scientific minds of their time and gave rise to modern chemistry and pharmacology, yet they all failed at their self-appointed task. Not one was ever able to transmute lead into gold.

  “Now, in the age of supercomputers, satellites, and atom smashers, we have returned to the very roots of science. We have done what thousands of people have wasted generations trying to accomplish. At the time of the great alchemists, gold represented the true power of the world. Today, power in the literal sense is what drives the planet. We have done something that mankind had given up as hopeless—we have turned base earth into the most precious substance in the universe. Not some gaudy metal with only limited use, but a power source that can recreate itself even as we use it up. With that kind of strength, Valery, no one will ever have the strength to challenge us.”

  Uncomfortable with his father’s words, Valery silently let the papers slide to the desk and walked out of the lab. He was reminded of a quote from Hindu mythology, in which Shiva announced, �
��I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” They were the same words used by Robert Oppenheimer after his creation vaporized a portion of the New Mexico desert.

  Arlington, Virginia

  Mercer woke just before six in the morning, the jet lag he’d expected burned away by the previous day’s adrenaline overdose. He rose stiffly, gently fingering the livid bruises on both shoulders. He shaved and showered before descending to the rec room. With a cup of thick black coffee in hand, he tried unsuccessfully to concentrate on the morning papers. Throughout the night, his sleep had been interrupted with new questions about Tish’s story, but there were no answers. He resigned himself to waiting for the information from David Saulman in Miami.

  By quarter of seven, his coffee cold in the cup, Mercer impatiently folded the newspapers and slid them down the length of the bar. Behind the bar, between a bottle of Remy Martin and one of Glenfiddich, lay a one-foot section of railroad track. Half of it was rust-colored and pitted, the other burnished to an almost mirror finish.

  Mercer retrieved the heavy rail and set it on a towel on the bar. Beside it he placed a shoe box containing a metal polishing kit, usually stored next to the antique fridge. He began polishing the rail with a remarkable amount of concentration, as if when the steel was beneath his fingers, nothing else in the world mattered. As the rust and grime slowly dissolved under the chemical and physical onslaught, he silently thanked Winston Churchill for giving him the idea for such a meditative device. When the British prime minister found himself under even greater stress than his legendary constitution could handle, he would build brick walls in the courtyard behind Number 10 Downing Street. The repetitive act of mortaring, setting, and pointing allowed his mind to disengage from the frantic pace of the Second World War and focus on one particular problem. When a solution was thrashed out in this fashion, an aide would tear down the wall, chip the mortar from the bricks, and stack them neatly for the next crisis.