Zero Hour

by Clive Cussler

  She took a deep breath. “If this is traveling, perhaps I could get used to it.”

  Kurt sat down as Hayley sampled the soup.

  “Must say I’ve never met someone so brave and intelligent who’s afraid to travel,” Kurt said.

  “I know it’s strange,” she said. “I know all the statistics, how the most dangerous part of any trip is the drive to the airport. I understand aerodynamics, and I spend half my life dreaming about far-off places, but something grips me when I leave home.”

  “You seem okay now,” Kurt pointed out.

  She smiled. “Maybe it’s the company.”

  “Consider me your personal guide and protector wherever we go.”

  “Truth is, I’d love to see the world,” she said. “And the universe. I used to dream about being an astronaut. Seems a little silly, when getting out of Sydney makes me feel like I’m going to be ill.”

  “The universe is a big step,” Kurt said. “Let’s start by getting to Perth.”

  The Ghan would take them south to Port Augusta, where they’d board another of Australia’s great trains for the journey west.

  For the next twenty minutes, they ate and chatted lightly, enjoying the atmosphere and the gentle motion of the train. Only after they’d had their second helpings of bread pudding did Kurt ask the question that was most on his mind.

  “So tell me about zero-point energy,” he said.

  She finished the last sip of her cabernet and slid her glass toward him. Kurt filled it halfway and then topped off his own glass.

  “Zero-point energy is a relatively simple concept,” she said. “It’s the energy remaining in a system when all that can be drawn from it has been taken out.”

  She pointed to the bottle of wine. “Imagine this bottle is a system or an energy field, and you or I decide to drink from it with a straw.”

  “Which we would never do,” Kurt pointed out.

  “Not unless we were outrageously desperate,” she replied with a conspiratorial smile. “But assuming we’d lost all sense of decorum and decided to give it a try, we’d be able to siphon off the energy from it right down to the bottom of the straw. But any wine below the reaches of the straw would remain behind untapped. That wine that can’t be reached is the zero-point energy.”

  “Unless we found a longer straw,” Kurt said.

  “Exactly,” she said, “except that physics tells us that, at some point, there’s no such thing as a longer straw.”

  “Can you give me a real example?”

  “The classic case is helium,” she said. “As it’s cooled, the molecular activity within the sample begins to slow, and the helium turns from a gas to a liquid. At absolute zero, it should freeze into a solid, and all molecular activity inside it should stop. But no matter how far one lowers the temperature, right down to absolute zero, helium will never turn into a solid under normal atmospheric pressure.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Some energy remains in the system. Some energy that can’t be removed.”

  “And that’s zero-point energy?”

  “Exactly,” she said once again.

  “So if it can’t be removed,” Kurt said, “what hope is there in accessing it?”

  “Well,” she hedged, “all things are impossible until they’re proven otherwise. Theoretically, there are fields of energy all around us sitting at their zero point. The same theory that postulates the existence of such fields suggests it may be possible to dislodge this hidden energy the way someone dislodges electrons in a power grid and reaps the benefits of electricity. Only, no one has been able to do it yet.”

  It sounded a little like the mythical ether of the old days to Kurt, a substance that was once believed to fill the emptiness between planets and galaxies when scientists of the day couldn’t believe there was such a thing as a vacuum.

  “Has anyone tried?” Kurt asked. “Before you and Thero, I mean.”

  “A few brave souls,” she said. “I assume you’ve heard of Nikola Tesla?”

  Kurt nodded.

  “Tesla was one of the first,” she said. “In the 1890s he began developing what he called his Dynamic Theory of Gravity. He tinkered away on it for years until 1937, when he claimed it was finally complete and promised boldly that it would displace Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, at least in explaining how gravity works.”

  “Don’t we know how gravity works?”

  “We know what gravity does,” she corrected, “but we don’t know how it causes what it causes. Tesla believed it was connected to a kind of energy field that existed everywhere, but in some places this field had greater concentrations than others. He also believed that that field could be tapped and the result would be an unlimited energy source, one that would bring peace and prosperity instead of thermonuclear explosions and genocide.”

  “So you’re telling me that zero-point energy and gravity are connected?”

  She nodded. “If Tesla’s right—and Einstein and the others are wrong—then, yes, the two are connected in very complex ways.”

  Kurt considered this. “Complex enough to cause what Thero is threatening?”

  She seemed to need a second to think about it. “Tesla spent four decades working on his theory,” she said, “more than half his life. He made his great announcement, insisting to the world that he’d finally completed the Dynamic Theory of Gravity, that all the details were worked out, and then he never published it. After all that work, he locked it away and never spoke of it again. Despite years of ridicule and the crushing poverty he’d fallen into thanks to the treachery of Westinghouse and Edison, Tesla took the Dynamic Theory of Gravity to his grave.”

  Kurt had never heard this story. “Has any record of it ever surfaced?”

  Hayley shook her head. “When Tesla died, your government seized all his belongings and papers—despite having no legal reason to do so. They were held for a year or so and then finally released to his family. His work on zero-point energy and the Dynamic Theory of Gravity were not among them.”

  Kurt considered what she’d told him. He knew Tesla’s reputation as a genius and as a mad scientist of sorts. He also knew Tesla was primarily considered a pacifist. It was fully conceivable that Tesla had destroyed all records of his theory. It was also possible that somewhere in the vast archives of the federal government there lay a file with Tesla’s name on it with the missing papers inside. He made a mental note to relay this information to Dirk the next time he checked in.

  “The fact is,” Hayley continued, “we’re dealing with a primal force of nature. Many would tell you it’s something best left alone.”

  “But Thero isn’t leaving it alone,” Kurt pointed out. “So what happens if he makes a breakthrough?”

  “If he’s successful, a vast output of energy and a side effect of short-lived, extremely powerful gravitational fluctuations.”

  “Can you try that in English,” Kurt said.

  “The Earth isn’t going to be vaporized or anything,” she said. “We’re not going to start floating out of our chairs like astronauts in zero g.”

  “What will we see?”

  “The first and most dramatic manifestations will be noticed in the seas,” she said.

  “The tides,” Kurt said.

  “Exactly,” she replied. “The oceans of the Earth are drawn by the gravitational pull of the moon. The land is pulled on as well, but, unlike the liquid of the ocean it’s locked in place except at the fault lines.”

  “How much power are we talking about here?”

  “If the papers sent to us are valid,” she began, “potentially more energy than all of humankind has produced and expended since the beginning of the industrial revolution.”

  Kurt paused before responding. For the second time in as many days, he found it hard to believe what he was being told.

&nb
sp; “How is such a thing possible?”

  “The same way it’s possible to run a nuclear submarine on a small chunk of uranium for years. Or to obliterate a large city with only twenty pounds of plutonium. There are vast amounts of energy hidden in places the normal human eye can’t see.”

  “But splitting a continent in half?” Kurt asked. “I’ve seen big earthquakes in California. They knock down highways and buildings, but, contrary to popular belief, half the state doesn’t float off into the Pacific.”

  “No,” she agreed. “No one is suggesting you’re going to see a divided continent with the ocean in the middle. But Thero is no fool. His first earthquake was a test, probably triggered from the station in the Tasman Mine. We have every reason to believe that that was just a small prototype. He’ll hit us harder next time, much harder, and he’ll hit us where Mother Nature has already done half the work.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Australia has the beginnings of a rift valley,” she explained. “Like the Great Rift Valley in Africa. Ours runs from Adelaide northeast toward the Great Barrier Reef. It began to form a hundred and fifty million years ago and then stopped for reasons unknown. The crust is thin and fractured in this section, and the pressure built up by a hundred million years without movement is waiting to be released.

  “If Thero can direct his weapon toward this point and create a gravitational distortion that wedges the plate apart even fractions of an inch, the pressure that’s been built up over the millennia might be released all at once. We’re talking about a series of earthquakes, hundreds even, all in quick succession along the rift. What normally takes ten thousand years might happen in a day, or a week, or even hours. The devastation from that kind of tremor will not be measurable on the Richter scale, or any other scale ever devised. Every city, every town, every village in Australia will be reduced to rubble. Not a single building will remain standing.”

  Kurt considered her point quietly. It was a grim scenario.

  “I know,” she said, taking his silence for disbelief. “I’m a silly academic pointing out the worst-case scenario. The sky is falling—once again. The thing is, when these scenarios actually happen, there’s always someone running around, wondering why no one told them it could be this bad. I’m telling you, right here and now, it’s going to be horrific.”

  Kurt’s face was dark. A new thought occurred to him. “I have to ask why you?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

  “The informant sent the papers to you,” Kurt clarified. “Why not send them straight to the authorities?”

  Hayley shrugged. “I can only guess it’s because of my background. The claims and calculations would seem like gibberish to someone else. Had the package been sent directly to the ASIO, I can only assume it would have ended up in the wastebin.”

  “Okay,” Kurt said, “but why not some other scientist?”

  “It’s a very obscure field,” she explained. “We’re a tiny group.”

  “Tiny but not infinitesimal,” Kurt said.

  “No,” she agreed, “not infinitesimal.”

  “So I have to ask you one more time: if there were other options, why do you think they picked you?”

  She paused for a long moment. “I don’t know,” she said finally. The sadness had returned to her voice. There was a tinge of weariness to it, and a stronger hint of guilt. “I don’t know.”

  She looked away, averting her eyes and staring out into the night. And, in that instant, Kurt knew that she was lying.

  He considered pressing her for the truth but held back as he felt a subtle change in the train’s motion, like the engineer had taken his hand off the throttle.

  Hayley looked up. “Something wrong?”

  “Not sure,” Kurt said. He stood just as the brakes went on at full pressure.

  The car lurched. Kurt braced himself and caught Hayley’s arm, keeping her from falling as the dinner plates and wineglasses flew off the table. The screech of the steel wheels sliding on the rails overrode all other noise as the quarter-mile-long train began skidding to a halt.

  Still holding Hayley, Kurt glanced out the window. The train itself was in a turn, on a slight uphill grade. Looking forward, Kurt saw two other passenger cars and the twin diesel engines. Sparks were flying from the wheels as they dug into the track. But something else caught his eye: tiny points of crimson burning in the night, flares along the track bed and, a little farther on, the outline of a tractor trailer stalled across the rail line at a crossing. Two men stood in front of it, waving their arms frantically.

  The breaking continued until the Ghan lurched awkwardly to a stop a few hundred feet from the crossing.

  At this point, Hayley could see the truck as well. “Lucky we were able to stop,” she said.

  Kurt glanced around. “Somehow, I don’t think luck’s got anything to do with it.”

  Before Hayley could reply, he spotted just what he expected to see: men in ski masks, coming out of the night and headed straight for the motionless train.

  The masked men came aboard the train at several different points, climbing onto the couplers between cars and forcing the doors.

  “What’s happening?” Hayley asked in a panicked voice.

  “I’ll give you one guess.”

  Hayley’s mind quickly grasped the truth. “They’re after us.”

  “Either that or this is a Butch Cassidy reenactment no one told me about.”

  Hayley grabbed her cell phone and dialed out in an attempt to call for help. “I have a signal, but I can’t seem to get through.”

  “Waste of time,” Kurt said. “They’re probably jamming the tower.”

  He glanced outside. Two car lengths down, another man stood out away from the train, scanning back and forth.

  “They’ve got a guy outside,” Kurt said. “Probably watching for anyone who might make a break for open ground.”

  A voice came over the public-address system. It had a bit of an accent, one that Kurt couldn’t place immediately. It certainly wasn’t the conductor.

  “Please remain calm,” it said. “We have hijacked the train, but we’re not interested in harming anyone. We’re looking for two people. A man with silver-gray hair, about six feet tall, and a woman about six inches shorter than him, with blond hair. Her name is Anderson. Cooperate with us, and no one will get hurt. Interfere or argue, and you will be beaten or killed.”

  As the announcement ended, Kurt cracked the cabin door a fraction and glanced down the narrow corridor.

  He saw two men down the hall, pushing their way into one of the compartments. They were wide-bodied brutes, with thick arms and legs and faces hidden by ski masks. They moved without a hint of elegance or remorse. Kurt pegged them as street thugs hired for money.

  A third man trailed behind them. He was thinner and taller. Even with the man’s ski mask, Kurt could tell he had a narrow face and sunken eyes. Though not as imposing physically, there was a more menacing air about him. Kurt guessed he was the headman.

  A wave of shouting erupted. The sound of a scuffle and someone being thrown around reverberated throughout the railcar. A moment later, a man about Kurt’s height was dragged out of the room. Beside him was a young woman. They looked like newlyweds.

  The leader examined them. “No,” he said without emotion, “not them.” Then he hauled off and punched the defenseless man. “That’s for resisting.”

  The man sagged, held up only by the two bandits. Their leader wasn’t done. He wound up and kicked the man in the chest, sending him tumbling back into his compartment.

  Every instinct in Kurt’s body told him to intervene, but the headman was clearly armed, and his two henchmen might have been. Besides, he had one job right now: keep Hayley Anderson safe.

  He went to the window again, preparing to smash it. Chargin
g out into the dark and battling one opponent seemed like a better play than a close-quarters fight against three.

  He grabbed a chair and raised it over his head. Before he could use it, the door flew open.

  “Drop it!” a voice shouted.

  Kurt let the chair go, and it clattered to the ground.

  He turned around slowly as the intruders measured him up and gave Hayley the once-over.

  “I assume you guys are here for the dishes,” Kurt said, pointing to the pile of flatware, cups, and glasses on the floor.

  The two men looked down, their eyes instinctively drawn in the direction Kurt had pointed. It was an amateur response, but they were amateurs, local muscle hired to do someone else’s dirty work. In the fraction of a second before they corrected their mistake, Kurt moved. He pivoted on his left foot and fired his right leg toward the closest man’s gut.

  The heel of his boot hit like a pile driver and knocked the man backward. He crumpled like a folding chair, sucking wind and grabbing his stomach as he hit the ground. The second thug lunged at Kurt, his huge pawlike hands going for Kurt’s neck.

  Kurt blocked the effort, grabbing the man’s wrist and twisting it. Using the attacker’s considerable momentum against him, Kurt spun him off balance and body-slammed him to the ground. The man hit the floor with a thud, and Kurt dropped down and hammered him with a forearm smash to the face.

  He would have slugged the guy again, but he knew the boss would be coming. He spun to his feet and turned.

  It was too late.

  The gaunt leader of the crew was already there with a black pistol in hand, holding it sideways, gangster style. He studied Hayley, nodded approvingly, and then turned back to Kurt.

  “I don’t need you,” he said.

  Kurt dove to the right as the man fired mercilessly. The first shell missed, the second grazed Kurt’s arm. The third bullet shattered the window behind him. Before the would-be killer could trigger a fourth shot, a different sound rang out. It was a sickly thud, like the sound of a broken-bat single being hit in a baseball game.

  The gunman’s head snapped forward, and the pistol flew from his hand. He fell into the cabin, hitting the table and splaying on the ground like a marionette whose strings had been cut.