The Solomon Effect (31 page)

Tobie thrust open the gray door and fell into a hot musty room
with exposed I-beams and pipes and a massive rectangular steel box that filled the dusty space with a loud roar. The HVAC unit stood on a concrete pad that raised it some ten to twelve inches off the floor. Crouched beside it, a lean man with short curly hair and wire-framed glasses was working a pry bar beneath one edge of the heavy sheet metal that formed the unit’s locked hatch. In honor of Halloween, he was dressed in a black wetsuit. A small fluorescent-yellow SCUBA tank known as a pony bottle rested on the edge of the concrete pad beside him.

When the heavy door slammed shut behind her, the man—Walker?—swung around, the pry bar still gripped in his fist. “Who the hell are—”

She kicked the pry bar out of his hand, the iron rod spinning across the room to hit an exposed pipe with a clatter.

Walker might be small and wiry, but a lifetime of racquetball and sailing had made him lithe and strong. Surging up, he snatched the metal pony bottle from the concrete plinth and swung it at her head.

She ducked, but the momentum of his swing carried Walker on around. Before he could catch his balance, he smacked the pony bottle into one of the exposed I-beams. The impact sheared off the bottle’s valve and knocked the container from his hands. It hit the concrete pad under the HVAC unit with a sudden release of deadly contaminated air that sounded like an explosion.

With a whoosh, the bottle took off like a rocket, a missile driven by six cubic feet of weaponized DP3 under 3,000 pounds of pressure. It clattered against a pipe, ricocheted off another I-beam. Walker hit the floor, his arms coming up to protect his head. Tobie dove behind the HVAC and dug frantically in her shoulder bag for the Beretta.

The empty pony bottle whacked against the far wall with a hollow clang and tumbled to the floor beside the pry bar. Walker scrambled toward it, fingers groping toward the iron rod. Tobie’s fist closed around the pistol’s barrel. Yanking the gun from her bag, she slammed the handle into Walker’s temple.

He went down and stayed down.

She was breathing hard, hideously conscious that with every breath she drew a noxious cloud of death into her lungs. A thump jerked her gaze to the door. The handle was turning.

“Shit.” Stumbling over Walker’s prostrate body, she leaped for the door and threw her weight against it.

From the far side of the panel came Jax’s shout, “October?”

“Don’t come in here!”
she screamed, sliding down to her haunches with her back pressed against the door. Half sobbing, she dug her cell phone out of her pocket and punched in 911 with shaking fingers.

“Hello? This is Ensign October Guinness. I have an emergency situation involving a biological hazard at the Miami Intercontinental.”

Jax stared through the wavy plastic barrier at the young woman
in a hospital gown on the inside of the isolation bubble.

“How is she?” he asked.

Beside him, the young Latino doctor in green scrubs glanced down at his chart. “She’s doing great. It’s basically like a bad cold. But she’ll need to stay in there until they’re sure she’s no longer contagious.”

“Can I talk to her?”

The doctor tapped the microphone beside him. “Through the intercom system.”

Jax cleared his throat. “Hey, October. You look like shit.”

“Thank you.” She blew her nose. “They haven’t told me anything. What’s going on?”

“You did it, Tobie; you stopped Walker before he’d managed to break the seal on the HVAC system. They’re monitoring everyone who was in the hotel, just to be safe, but so far the only two people showing any signs of exposure to the pathogen are you and Walker. Not that anyone knows what really happened. The official line is they’re worried about an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.”

“So how’s Walker?”

“Not good, actually. The arrogant SOB obviously never thought to check his own DNA. They’ve had him on life support for the past twelve hours, but they’re about ready to pull the plug. How’s that for poetic justice?”

She sniffed. “What about Boyd?”

“Well, according to the press, the General died a hero, saving a young Naval ensign from an unknown assailant. That’s you, by the way. The ensign, I mean—not the assailant.”

She stared at him with wide, red-rimmed eyes. “That’s not poetic justice.”

“No. That’s the government covering its ass.”

“And the guy in the elevator?”

“Boyd’s aide, Captain Syd Phillips. He’s downstairs in the ICU, too, but he’s expected to make it. Says he thought the entire operation was a legitimate, authorized black op.”

“You believe him?”

“Actually, yes. That’s one of the problems with black ops. They’re all dirty, and they’re all secret. So how was he supposed to know this one wasn’t actually authorized?”

“What’ll happen to him?”

“He can kiss his military career—and his pension—good-bye.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

Jax rubbed the side of his nose with his knuckles. “He was up to his captain’s bars in a plan to kill millions—including you and me. And his defense is, ‘I was just following orders’? Excuse me while I don’t feel sorry for him.”

October blew her nose again. “How’d those two ever get together in the first place?”

“You mean Boyd and Walker?” Jax shrugged. “Who knows? They probably met at some political fund-raiser for the neofascistly inclined. I suspect Boyd said something
like—” Jax pitched his voice into a gravelly Texas drawl. “‘You know what we need? Some new plague that’ll wipe out all these damned A-rabs, and maybe take out the Jews, too.’ And Walker probably said”—Jax switched to a Boston twang—“‘Funny you should mention that. I had this old professor at MIT who told me once about a nasty little pathogen he used to play with back when he was a Nazi…’”

She laughed softly, then shook her head, her smile fading. “It’s terrifying to realize how close a handful of men can come to killing tens of millions of people.”

“That’s exactly what makes bioweapons so scary. All it takes is one nut case with a mission—or even a careless mistake—and half the people on this planet could die. Look at the anthrax scare of 2001. And anthrax is actually pretty hard to weaponize. There are plenty of nasties in the world’s laboratories that would be a lot easier to disperse. And a hell of a lot more deadly.”

She stared at him through the wavy plastic, her face pale.

He said, “You doing okay in there, October?”“

She rubbed her forehead. “Yeah. The isolation is just starting to get to me, that’s all.”

“How about if I send you some books? What would you like?”

She thought about it a minute, then smiled. “Got anything on the French Revolution?”

Wondering what’s real and what isn’t? Here’s a quick rundown, along with some sources for those interested in doing further research.

• The bioweapon “Sword of Solomon” is a figment of our imagination.
  
• Operation Caesar, Germany’s last-ditch effort near the end of the Second World War to supply its ally, Japan, with war material and weapons technology, was real.
  
• The Type XB submarine described here did exist and was used as part of Operation Caesar. One of these massive submarines, U-234, surrendered at the end of the war and was found to be carrying uranium and a variety of other war material to Japan. Another Type XB, loaded with a cargo of mercury, sank off the coast of Norway at the end of the war and is indeed causing serious problems. Four keels for an even larger U-boat, the XI-B, were indeed laid down in the shipyards of Bremen. There are no records of these giant subs ever having been completed, although rumors persist that one was built and launched on a secret mission at the
  end of the war. The Deutsches U-Boot Museum-Archiv in Cuxhaven-Altenbruch, Germany, is real, and is an invaluable source of documents on German submarines and their crews. For more detailed information on the U-boats of World War II, see the excellent publications of Rainer Busch and Hans Joachim Röll. The book Jax is reading,
  Iron Coffins: A Personal Account of the German U-boat Battles of World War II,
  by Herbert Warner, is real, and is a fascinating memoir written by one of the few German submarine commanders to survive the war.
  
• At the end of World War II, over one hundred U-boats surrendered to the Allies and were scuttled off the coast of Britain in what was known as Operation Deadlight. These submarines are now being salvaged for their pre-1945 steel.
  
• The demolition of ships, or shipbreaking, has now moved almost exclusively to third-world countries and entails serious health and environmental concerns. For more information, see
  End of the Line,
  a photo essay on shipbreaking in Bangladesh by Brendan Cor at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Ship_breaking, and Greenpeace’s
  Platform on Shipbreaking,
  www.shipbreakingplatform.com.
  
• The history of the United States government involvement in remote viewing is much as described by McClintock in Chapter 4. For more information, we suggest Jon Ronson’s
  Men Who Stare at Goats
  (2005), and Joseph McMoneagle’s
  Mind Trek
  (1997).
  
• The history of Kaliningrad Oblast, formerly part of the German province of East Prussia, is essentially as described here. Because Western access to Kaliningrad was, until recently, prohibited, little has been written about the modern
  oblast. By far the best easily available study of Kaliningrad today is “Between East and West: a study of the Kaliningrad Region as a Russian exclave in the EU,” a masters thesis by Fred Balvert at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2007.
  
• On the massacres and ethnic cleansing of Germans after World War II, little has been written in English. Probably the best look is still
  Documents on the Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern-Central Europe,
  volumes I–III, translated into English and published by the Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees, and War Victims, Bonn, in the 1950s. Be warned, it makes haunting reading.
  
• For the tragic history of Izmir/Smyrna, see Margorie Housepian Dobkin,
  Smyran 1922: The Destruction of a City
  (1972).
  
• The number of Palestinian refugees massacred at Sabra and Shatila in 1982 is disputed. Between six hundred and eight hundred bodies were recovered; another eighteen hundred civilians were reported missing and never found. Most are believed to lie buried in mass graves, many of them beneath Beirut’s Cité Sportif. See “Sabra and Shatila 20 Years On,”
  BBC News,
  14 September 2002, and Leila Shahid, “The Sabra and Shatila Massacres: Eye-Witness Reports,”
  Journal of Palestine Studies,
  Vol. 32, No. 1. (Autumn 2002). You can also watch the eyewitness account of British journalist Robert Fisk in
  The Martyrs Smile, Part Two,
  at www.you-tube.com/watch? v=_JAmZCLhaoQ&NR=1, although be warned that the images are gruesome.
  
• Historians continue to argue over the true extent of the German atomic program during World War II. Recent discoveries in Russian archives and what was East Germany
  are much as Wolfgang describes them in Chapters 42–43, and have made many earlier studies out of date. See Mark Walker,
  Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb
  (2005), and
  Hitlers Bombe,
  by Rainer Karlsch and Heiko Petermann (2007).
  
• Much has been written about the Nazi concentration camps and medical experiments. See
  Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans,
  by Vivien Spitz, a correspondent at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (republished 2005), and Harold Marcuse,
  Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001
  (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
  
• For the Dachau Massacre of German prisoners of war by the U.S. 3
  ^rd
  Battalion of the 157
  ^th
  Infantry Regiment, see Colonel Howard Buechner’s
  The Hour of the Avenger
  (1986). Again, the numbers vary, from fifteen to more than six hundred; Eisenhower is said to have put the number of German prisoners murdered at around five hundred.
  
• Politics has turned the subject of the ethnic origins of modern Jews into a potential mine field. For two opposing views, see Tel Aviv University historian and Holocaust survivor Shlomo Sand’s book,
  Matai ve’ech humtza ha’am hayehudi? (When and How the Jewish People Was Invented,
  2008, in Hebrew), versus the article “The Khazar Myth and the New Anti-Semitism” by Steven Plaut, an American-born economics professor at the University of Haifa. For a history of the Khazars, Kevin Alan Brook’s
  The Jews of Khazaria
  (republished 2006), is considered a classic. For more on the Arab Christians, see Charles Sennott,
  The Body and the Blood: The Middle East’s Vanishing Christians and the Possibility for Peace
  (2002).
  
• Operation Paperclip was a very real program that brought German scientists to the United States at the end of WWII to work on various projects for the government, from NASA to the CIA. Not all were Nazis. Those who were Nazis were brought in illegally and without the knowledge of either Truman or Eisenhower. See Clare Lasby’s
  Operation Paperclip
  (1975), and Christopher Simpson’s
  Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War
  (1988).
  
• For a look at American black ops, see Tim Weiner,
  Legacy of Ashes
  (2007). For American operations run against Cuba from Florida, see Don Bohning,
  The Castro Obessession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba
  (2005). On U.S. biological and chemical warfare projects, see Seymour Hersh,
  Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal
  (1969), and William Broad, Stephen Engelberg, and Judith Miller, Germs:
  Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War
  (2001). On modern ethnic biowarfare, see the British Medical Association Report,
  Biotechnology, Weapons, and Humanity
  (1999); the article reported in the
  London Sunday Times
  by Uzi Mahnaimi and Marie Colvin, “Israel Planning ‘ethnic bomb’ (November 1998); and “Lethal Legacy: Bioweapons for Sale,” an article by Joby Warrick and John Mintz in the Sunday, April 20, 2003
  Washington Post
  on the sale of apartheid-era South African manmade pathogens to the private sector.
  
• The “People of the Book Conference” draws upon various references in the Qur’an, where Christians and Jews are referred to as “People of the Book,” i.e., those who have received and believe previous revelations of God’s prophets, including the Jewish Torah, the Book of Psalms, and the Four Christian Gospels. In Islam, the Qur’an is seen as
  the completion of these earlier scriptures. See, for instance, “Surely those who believe, and those who are Jews, and Christians, and the Sabians—whoever believes in God and the Last Day and does good, they shall have their reward from the Lord. And that will be no fear for them, nor shall they grieve.” (Qur’an 2:62, 5:69, and many others) In Judaism, “People of the Book” tends to be applied specifically to the Jewish people and the Torah.