The Roswell Conspiracy (18 page)

“Well, the pronunciation is way off if it is. I parsed the sentence into its syllabic components. The only part of it that could be remotely Russian is
pree vodat kah
. If I’m hearing it right, it means ‘leads to’.”

“So if it’s Russian, it means ‘
rah pahnoy
leads to
zay nobee um
’?”

“The last part might be a single word. Zaynobium. Don’t ask me what it means. I just tried plugging several different spellings of it into Google and got nothing except a link to a video of your grandmother.”

The word was meaningless to Jess. She looked at Fay, who shrugged back at her.

“What about the first part?” Jess asked.

“That’s interesting. The first thing that popped into my head was a slightly different pronunciation. Rapa Nui.”

“As in Easter Island?” Fay said, her eyes shining with revelation.

“It’s just a guess,” Silverman said. “Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.

“No, Mike,” Jess said. “You’ve been very helpful. Thanks.” They said goodbye and hung up.

Jess was mesmerized by the chain of events. A supposed alien crash-lands at Roswell, hands Fay a wooden engraving showing figures from the Nazca lines, and utters a phrase implying that the map on the other side depicts Easter Island.

“What do you think Zaynobium is?” Fay said, but Jess couldn’t even hazard a guess.

Fay thought about it for a moment and then bounced in her seat with excitement. “Maybe that’s the alien home planet!” She took the wooden tablet out of her bag and looked at it again with new eyes.

“Let’s talk about it over lunch.” Jess moved to get out of the car, but Fay put her hand out to stop her.

“Where are you going?”

“To that restaurant.”

“But we have to find Tyler and tell him what we found out.”

“Nana, you need to eat.”

“I can eat later. Do you realize this is what I’ve been searching for the past five years? Rapa Nui could be the missing piece of the puzzle!”

“But how could Easter Island be linked to both Roswell and the Nazca lines?”

“Some anthropologists think the Nazca people could have migrated from South America to Polynesia.” Fay removed the ancient engraving from her bag and reverently ran her fingers over the grooves etched into the wood. “The person who made this map might be a descendant of those voyagers. If he left clues to the lines’ true purpose, it would mean that somewhere on Easter Island lies the answer to one of the world’s greatest mysteries.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Tyler and Grant had spent the last hour seated at a conference table, reciting to Morgan, Vince, and Kessler the sequence of events over the past two days that led them here. They included everything, including the cryptic items that Nadia Bedova asked about outside the warehouse.

“Do you know what Bedova meant by Icarus?” Morgan asked.

Tyler knew the myth to which it referred: the boy who escaped Crete only to fly too close to the sun, which melted his waxen wings and caused him to fall to his death. “Sounded like a code name to me,” he said. “Maybe it’s a Russian spy.”

“Or a secret project,” Grant said.

“And you don’t know what’s happening on July twenty-fifth?” Vince said. His eyes had flinched noticeably when Tyler had told them that part. It obviously struck a nerve.

“No idea,” Tyler said.

“What about Wisconsin Avenue or the Baja cartel?”

Tyler shook his head. “Perhaps if you shared some information about the Killswitch, we could be of help.”

Kessler straightened in his seat. “That is my project. And its real name is Lightfall. ‘The Killswitch’ is Collins’s nickname for the device, and everyone on the team started calling it that.” He was obviously unhappy about sharing this information.

“I’ll bet it’s not a new kind of blender,” Grant said.

“You are an idiot,” Morgan said. “This is a DARPA black project. Lightfall is a weapons program.”

“What does it do?” Tyler asked.

“I don’t have time for this,” Kessler said, jumping out of his seat. Tyler could imagine how shaken the scientist must be, knowing his life’s work had been stolen.

“Dr. Kessler,” Morgan said, “this is more important than anything else you could be doing right now. Please sit down.”

Kessler looked at the door and grumbled, but he took his seat, massaging his temples as if he were soothing a headache. After a few moments, he said with a tired voice, “You, of course, know what an EMP is.”

Tyler nodded. “When an H-bomb explodes at high altitude, it blasts out an electromagnetic pulse that fries anything with a computer chip.”

“So the Killswitch is a nuke?” Grant said.

“No, it is much more sophisticated than that,” Kessler said. “Under Project Lightfall, we designed the bomb to emit the pulse without a thermonuclear explosion. The weapon has the capability to penetrate hardened bunkers and vehicles, even at low altitudes, and it leaves no residual radioactive fallout.”

“So it could be used in conventional wars,” Tyler said.

“It’s not my place to say where or how it’s used. That’s for military commanders and politicians to decide.”

Grant grunted.

“I suppose you have a problem with me being a weapons developer,” Kessler said.

“Not at all. When I was in the Rangers, I wouldn’t have minded setting one of those babies off over a tank division that I was about to engage. Would have made my job easier.”

That seemed to calm Kessler. “We were planning to do our first test next week at the Woomera range south of here.”

“Why Australia?”

“The Australians have material critical to operation of the weapon. It was a joint development.”

“What material?”

“You don’t need to know that.”

Tyler was confused. “If the weapon was stolen, then why the truck bomb?”

“A cover-up attempt,” Morgan said. “If that truck had made it through the gates and blown up Pine Gap, everyone here would have been killed. The ensuing investigation would have come to the conclusion that the weapon was destroyed in the explosion.”

“How powerful is the bomb?”

Kessler rubbed his mouth. “It depends on the yield of the trigger. That’s what we were hoping to find out with the tests. But my estimate says that an airburst at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet would disable everything within a thirty-mile radius.”

Grant leaned forward, slack-jawed at the weapon’s destructive potential. “That’s the size of Washington.”

“Or Paris. Or Beijing. If the Killswitch is used to take out a major city, the effects would be catastrophic.”

“Now you see why we need your help,” Vince said. “You can identify the thieves.”

“How did they steal it?”

“We’re still tracking that down. But it looks like it was done in transit, on the way here from the Alice Springs airport. The truck never showed up. With the police investigating the warehouse deaths and the explosion, we’re stretched thin looking for it.”

“What about the airport?” Tyler said. “Roadblocks?”

“The Alice Springs airport is tiny, so we’re checking every plane flying out. Roadblocks are more difficult. We can’t have the police stop every car and truck leaving the area to do a thorough search without telling them what they’re looking for.”

“You can’t exactly put out an all-points bulletin advertising that the US military lost something that could send Sydney or Melbourne back to the Stone Age,” Grant said.

Vince nodded. “The press would get hold of it in no time, and then we’d have a panic on our hands.”

“But it can’t be set off,” Kessler protested. “Not without the trigger.”

Morgan sat with a mixture of sigh and growl. “Dr. Kessler, it’s about time you tell us exactly how the Killswitch works. And I mean everything.”

Kessler stood and glared at Morgan. “I reiterate my protest. These men are not properly vetted—”

“Your protest is noted,” she said. “Continue.”

He seethed for a long minute before finally throwing up his hands in defeat. “All right,” he said, pacing as he spoke. “Do you know what hafnium is?”

Tyler didn’t hesitate. “It’s a metallic element. It doesn’t have many uses, but it’s important in the cladding of nuclear fuel rods to control the reaction.”

Grant tapped the table. “Wasn’t there something about a bomb that used a hafnium isomer? I read about it a few years ago. DARPA was developing it, but there was some controversy over whether it actually worked.”

“How do you know that?” Kessler said in amazement.

“Well, we
are
experts in explosives. Reading the literature on the subject is kind of a job necessity.”

“After those articles came out, all future press communication on the process was halted,” Kessler said.

“Let me guess,” Tyler said. “Because it works.”

Kessler nodded. “It’s called induced gamma emission. And yes, it works. Hafnium-3, the isomer you mentioned, is the most powerful non-nuclear explosive in existence. One gram of it has the explosive power of three hundred kilograms of TNT.”

Grant whistled in appreciation. “Good things come in small packages.”

“The Killswitch uses an isomer trigger. Without it, the weapon is nothing more than a very expensive bomb. All other EMP weapons with an effective range of more than half a kilometer are either nuclear or the size of a house, making them impractical in battle situations. Using a hafnium isomer to generate the gamma radiation necessary, we were able to shrink the weapon to only fifty kilograms, and half of that weight is for the plastic explosive to set off the isomeric reaction in the trigger. Most of the design expense went into compacting the weapon into such a small size.”

“So the Killswitch is triggered by hafnium-3?” Tyler asked.

“No. Production of hafnium-3 is prohibitively expensive. It would cost a billion dollars for just a few grams. We have something even more powerful. A hafnium isomer called xenobium. It’s more stable than hafnium-3 and twice as powerful.”

Tyler chewed his lip. “You glossed over the fact that both hafnium-3 and induced gamma emission weapons emit gamma rays. How deadly is this xenobium?”

“It can be carried safely in a shielded lead container.”

“And the gamma rays from the explosion of the Killswitch?” Morgan said.

Kessler looked around the table and cleared his throat. “At low altitudes the explosion would produce a lethal dose of radiation for anyone within a mile or more depending on the size of the xenobium trigger.”

“Sounds like a nuclear weapon to me,” Grant chuffed.

“It is non-nuclear in the sense that it is not a fission or fusion device, and as I mentioned there is no lingering radioactive fallout. Beyond the immediate region around the explosion, the effects are not fatal.”

“Supposedly. Didn’t you just say that you haven’t tested it yet?”

“Of course. All our calculations are purely theoretical at this point.”

Everyone went silent at the potential catastrophe if the weapon was set off in a populated area, possibly on July twenty-fifth.

“Do the hijackers have this new isomer?” Tyler finally asked.

“They don’t. All one hundred grams are stored ten stories under Pine Gap, locked in a hardened vault. We had been planning to divide it into five-gram fragments to use in the Killswitch, but right now it’s still secure and in a single piece.”

“Could they have made their own xenobium?”

“As far as we know, no one else is even close to obtaining the capability to manufacture it. The problem is that they might have found another source of the isomer.”

“From where?”

Kessler took a breath and wiped his brow as he sat. “From outer space.”

“Excuse me?” Grant said with a laugh and looked at Tyler while pointing at Kessler. “I thought he said outer space.”

“That’s what I heard,” Tyler said.

“I did say outer space,” Kessler replied, not getting Grant’s sarcasm. “The sample at Pine Gap was found in Western Australia ten years ago. In 1993 a few truck drivers and gold prospectors reported a bright light and a series of thunderous booms. The explosion was so large that it registered 3.9 on the Richter scale. Because the area was so remote and because no one was injured, nobody went to investigate it for years. Some theorized it was a nuclear blast set off by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.”

“Come on!” Grant said incredulously. “The group that gassed the Tokyo subway system?”

“I didn’t say I agreed with such ludicrous speculation. No one ever detected radiation, so the likelihood of an atomic weapon was minimal. However, the impact of an iron meteorite like the one that created the Barringer Crater in Arizona was also ruled out because no crater was found at the site of the seismic event.”

“Leaving what?” Tyler said.

“We now believe it was an airburst explosion of a meteor above twenty thousand feet. With no trees in that part of the desert to be blown down by a shockwave, it’s possible that the evidence would be hard to find. When geologists went to investigate the mystery long after the event, they conducted a careful search of the area around the seismic event and came back with a single sample from the location’s epicenter. After extensive testing, it was determined that the material was an unusual isomer of hafnium called xenobium.”

“Is that the only sample in the world?” Vince asked.

“To our knowledge it’s the only one that still exists. The first known sample was discovered a century ago by a Russian scientist named Ivan Dombrovski.”

Grant snorted. “He sounds like an offensive lineman for the Green Bay Packers.”

Kessler ignored him. “Dombrovski escaped from Russia during the Bolshevik revolution. He claimed to have recovered the material from the area of the Tunguska blast and used it to buy his American citizenship.”

“The Tunguska blast?” Tyler said. “So we know if was caused by an exploding meteorite?”

“No one’s ever been able to definitively prove what caused the blast. Explanations include a meteorite, comet, or even black hole. And some crackpots theorize it was an alien spacecraft that crashed and vaporized in the explosion.”

Tyler and Grant exchanged looks at the mention of aliens. The subject did seem to keep coming up in the last few days. Tyler felt his ironclad skepticism cracking just a bit.