Zero Hour

by Clive Cussler

  Such a tack had two benefits. First, it would keep the Russians guessing and therefore keep Kurt and the NUMA crew alive. And, second, if anyone happened to be watching, they might notice the containership lost at the bottom of the world and question the crazy path she was taking.

  “Helmsman,” Kurt said, still keeping his eyes locked on the center of the map, “would you please set the ship on a heading of 195 degrees true.”

  Gregorovich lowered his pistol and stepped back. All eyes looked at the map. The helmsman plugged in the coordinates. A line appeared on the chart. It led almost due south, with a slight westerly lean. It ran aground at the tip of a jagged little peninsula jutting out from Antarctica.

  “So Thero’s station is there?” Kirov asked, bluntly. “In Antarctica?”

  Kurt said nothing. He kept his eyes still, calculating the ship’s speed.

  The Rama began to turn, the first of Kurt’s zigs. He checked his watch. Four hours, he told himself. In four hours, he would give them a new heading.

  “Answer me,” Kirov demanded, grabbing Kurt.

  “Wait,” Gregorovich shouted. “We are on our way. I’m assuming if we get off course somehow, our polestar, Mr. Austin, will reroute us.”

  Clearly, he saw what Kurt was doing. For some reason, he seemed okay with it. That thought gained strength when Gregorovich handed another weapon to Captain Winslow.

  “Détente,” he said, explaining. Then he snapped his fingers at one of the Vietnamese crewmen. “Show them to their quarters. Mr. Austin and I are going to share a drink.”

  The situation had worked out better than Kurt might have hoped. They’d bought some time, and they now had two rifles plus his pistol. They just might survive until morning.

  • • •

  DIRK PITT FOUND HIMSELF standing in the mist on a low rise surrounded by tall pines and cedars. He and Vice President Sandecker had hitched a ride on a B-1 bomber making a transcontinental trip. Traveling at Mach 2, they’d arrived at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California nearly a full hour before they’d taken off, at least according to the local clock anyway.

  It had been a great ride, and one that Pitt enjoyed as a pilot. He might have enjoyed it more had he known the purpose of the trip.

  From Travis, a CH-53 Sea Stallion had brought them northwest. It thundered across the landscape, finally setting them down on a rocky outcropping high atop an inaccessible ridge overlooking Sonoma Lake.

  There Pitt and Sandecker met with Jim Culver, head of the NSA. He was fuming mad, and he and Pitt might have come to blows had Sandecker not been there to intervene.

  “Who do you people think you are? Hacking an NSA secure database?”

  “I’d say it wasn’t all that secure if we could do it in a day,” Pitt replied, though he realized there were few people out there with skills like Yaeger’s.

  “Beyond that,” Pitt added, “I wouldn’t have needed to if you’d have been forthcoming with some answers about Tesla and a theory he either burned or hid seventy years ago.”

  “So you admit it?”

  “Sure do,” Pitt said. “There’s a terrorist out there threatening to turn an entire country into a parking lot. And I’m not going to leave a single stone unturned in my effort to stop him. If that ruffles your feathers, then I don’t happen to care. One of my ships is already missing. It may have gone down with all hands. Compared to those lives, whatever secret you’re trying to protect doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

  Culver shrank back. Years on Wall Street and in the boardroom, followed by a successful political career, had not prepared him for the kind of life-and-death intensity that Pitt unleashed. The anger in Pitt’s opaline green eyes caused Culver to forget that he was an inch taller than Pitt and thirty pounds heavier.

  He turned to Sandecker. “I know he’s a friend of yours, Mr. Vice President. And I’m sure you’re going to defend him. But this is inexcusable.”

  “Not only is he a friend of mine,” Sandecker said proudly, “but he’s a patriot who’s done more for this country than you and your whole army of schemers and bureaucrats ever will. So whatever your problem is, you need to get over it. The President has ordered that there be cooperation on this matter. That’s why we’re here.”

  “Do you two have any idea what’s at stake?” Culver said.

  “Do you?” Pitt replied.

  Culver fumed. Whatever stand he thought he was going to make had crumbled. “Fine. But understand this. What I’m about to show you has been known only to the presidents of the United States and a select few others. Not even ranking members of Congress. It’s considered a national secret of the highest order. To speak of it, or otherwise disclose what you see here, is punishable. And I’m quite sure this even applies to you, Mr. Pitt.”

  Pitt looked around. “Not sure how this qualifies as some big secret. As far as I can tell, we’re standing in a national park or something.”

  “No,” Culver said, “you’re standing on top of a catastrophe. This is the true epicenter of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a natural disaster in the eyes of the world. But, in actuality, the largest self-inflicted wound in U.S. history.”

  “April 18, 1906,” Pitt said. “The day Daniel Watterson and General Hal Cortland died.”

  “That’s right,” Culver said. “Only they didn’t die in Topeka, Kansas, and San Diego, California, like it says on their papers. They died right here, twenty stories beneath our feet, along with eighty-one others. Casualties not counted in the official death toll of the earthquake.”

  “The obituaries,” Pitt said, understanding what happened. “They were all the same, just a few words changed: name, cause of death, and location. They were all written by one person as part of the cover-up. No one bothered to distinguish them. Whoever it was, they didn’t count on modern computer analysis to pick up the similar patterns.”

  “It was 1906,” Culver said sarcastically. “I’m guessing they didn’t think that far ahead. Come with me.”

  Together, the three of them walked back into the forest. They passed through a length of electrified fence and came to a sealed hatch that was as sturdy as any Pitt had ever seen on a ship. In fact, it reminded him of the doors to NORAD’s mountain bunker, only a lot smaller.

  Culver entered a code on the outside and then used a key card. A seal cracked and the hatch opened like an oyster, revealing steps.

  The three of them went inside, and Culver flipped a bank of switches. Old 1940s-style fixtures came to life, illuminated by modern halogen bulbs. A short walk brought them to another sealed door. Once through this door, they entered an elevator. It took them down into a lighted cave.

  The cave was mammoth in size, but it appeared to be man-made, or perhaps shored up by man. Concrete lined the walls in places. Steel I beams spanned the cave in dizzying directions, welded and cross-braced in places. To Pitt, it looked like some giant had gone crazy with an Erector set.

  They came to an open section. Pitt stared down into a chasm. It dropped hundreds of feet. Water filled the bottom.

  “This is where the experiment happened,” Culver said. “Using Tesla’s theory, Watterson claimed he could create and transmit limitless energy. They built a machine much like what your friend found in the mine.”

  Pitt guessed at the series of events. “After Tesla shut down Wardenclyffe, Watterson took the idea back to the army, making his own deal with General Cortland.”

  Culver nodded. “According to Watterson, he’d developed an improved version.”

  “Depends on your definition of the word improved,” Sandecker added.

  “That it does,” Culver said, pointing to some sparkling residue on the cave wall. “See this? It’s shocked quartz. You’re only supposed to get it when a meteor hits the Earth or an A-bomb goes off. The whole cave is filled with it, right down into the chasm.”

  “From the e
xperiment,” Pitt surmised.

  Culver nodded. “Watterson activated his machine and began to get feedback. A data line running from down here up to a small receiving station on the surface recorded what happened. Multiple waves of energy, all from an initial impulse of minor proportions. Each wave of energy was many times more powerful than the one before it.”

  “So Watterson’s experiment was a success,” Pitt noted.

  “It went too well, in fact,” Culver said. “He couldn’t shut it off. Couldn’t control the energy he’d released. The waves grew, flowing in and out of this cave, shaking it to pieces. The observers and military personnel were crushed and buried down here. But the devastation didn’t end until they triggered a long-overdue movement in the San Andreas Fault.”

  “This experiment caused the 1906 San Francisco quake?” Pitt asked, just to be sure.

  Culver nodded. “By extension, that means the U.S. government did it and never owned up to it. Three thousand people died, countless more were badly burned or wounded. Eighty-five percent of the city was destroyed. So now you can see why it must remain a secret. People would never trust the government if they knew.”

  Dirk Pitt could hardly believe what he was hearing. “I’ve got news for you Culver: no one really trusts the government anyway. Keeping secrets like this is reason number one.”

  “What you’ve been told does not leave this cave,” Culver grunted.

  “Fine,” Pitt said. “What happened a hundred years ago doesn’t really concern me. What I’m trying to do is stop it from happening again. Only a thousand times worse. To that end, I need Tesla’s theory. I know you guys have it. The Office of Alien Property took his papers when he died. They were folded into the OSS, and somehow that all leads up to you.”

  “We do have it,” Culver admitted, “but not because it was stolen. The OSS brought Tesla here in ’37 when he was finally threatening to publish the theory. We showed him this place. Gave him the data and told him what happened. He handed the theory over that same day. The Office of Alien Property was just making sure no other copies existed.”

  “You’d better give us yours, then,” Pitt said.

  “I’ll turn it over,” Culver said. “But let me be clear: the theory and the technology must be kept under wraps. Ever since this accident, we’ve watched people approach what Tesla discovered. Ninety-nine percent of them touch on it and then go the other way, even the serious ones. Those that don’t turn back have fallen on hard times.”

  “So you guys were watching Thero,” Pitt said wryly. “Probably helping make sure he failed.”

  “It wasn’t hard,” Culver said. “He’s a nut. Delusional, and possibly schizophrenic. We just helped people see that more clearly.”

  Pitt glanced at Sandecker. “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

  “Indeed,” Sandecker said.

  Pitt turned back to Culver. “You probably could have saved the world a lot of pain if you’d have brought him into the fold.”

  “We should have put a bullet in him,” Culver said bitterly. “We don’t want him, or anyone like him, in the fold. We don’t want anyone messing around with this. Ever.”

  Pitt narrowed his gaze. “Why? We pursue every other technology. Nuclear bombs, biological and chemical weapons. Why not this?”

  Culver didn’t blink. But he took the long way around in explaining. “My wife and I have a farm, Mr. Pitt. We have a few cows, a few goats, a few ATVs, and a whole lot of dogs. Some big dogs, some little dogs, even a few mean dogs. But there’s one scrawny mutt that just never was right. He never behaves the same way twice. Friendly one second, trying to tear your arm off the next. That dog scares me more than the mean ones. He scares the other dogs too. They give him a wide birth. Even the big alphas.

  “Zero-point energy is like that. It’s unpredictable. Erratic. The NSA has had people studying it for decades. We’re too damned scared to do anything like this experiment because each time we run the numbers, we come up with a range of possible outcomes instead of just one. Could you imagine firing a gun if you had a fifty-fifty chance of hitting the target or having the gun blow up in your face?”

  “No,” Pitt admitted.

  “Nor can I,” Culver said. “But that’s how it is. With a gun, you pull the trigger and the bullet fires. With a bomb, you hit the detonator and the explosives blow. Even a hydrogen bomb has an established yield. But with this stuff . . . With this stuff, the results seem to be random, like it has a mind of its own. And that means once you press the switch, all bets are off. At that point, anything can happen.”

  Pitt recalled Yaeger’s comment describing it as a moody genie, best kept in a bottle. It seemed the NSA agreed with him. He had a feeling Culver was making the point for a reason. “What are you really trying to say?”

  Culver still wouldn’t shoot straight, perhaps enjoying the little bit of power he was still holding.

  “Have your man run the numbers,” Culver said. “If he disagrees with our people, then we can argue about it. But this device must be prevented from operating under any circumstances. I assure you that’s how the President sees it. We have two nuclear attack submarines moving into the area. As soon as we have a location, they’re going to destroy the site with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.”

  Pitt glanced at Sandecker, who nodded gravely. He’d already been told.

  “It has to be done,” Sandecker said.

  To his surprise, Pitt found himself agreeing.

  MV Rama, 0330 hours local time

  After a stop in the mess hall, and a change of clothes, Kurt sat in a dingy cabin with gray-brown walls lit by a single incandescent light.

  A chessboard sat in front of him on a small table. The game was in mid-progress, the pieces already in motion. A quarter of them stood on the side, fallen soldiers already taken by the other player.

  To the left was an almost empty bottle of Stolichnaya vodka and two shot glasses, which Anton Gregorovich had just finished topping off for the seventh time. To the right—easily within both men’s reach—sat the Makarov pistol that Gregorovich had given Kurt.

  Kurt had been in there for most of the night. This was their third game. Occasionally, Gregorovich asked him questions, which Kurt did his best to deflect. More often than not, he sat silently brooding.

  Kurt figured it was some kind of test to see if he could hold his liquor or his tongue.

  Eyeing the board stoically, Gregorovich finally moved, sliding a bishop into Kurt’s section. The move created options, forcing Kurt to choose between saving a pawn or a rook or making an offense move and letting both pieces go.

  Done with his move, Gregorovich pushed one of the overflowing shot glasses toward Kurt and lifted the other to his mouth.

  He knocked it down and then turned to the bottle for a refill. As he did, Kurt dumped the contents of his shot glass in a planter with a dying fern in it and quickly brought the glass back to his mouth.

  He finished the last sip as Gregorovich turned back to him. “I wouldn’t do that,” Kurt suggested, putting the glass down firmly.

  “What?” Gregorovich asked. “The bishop or the vodka?”

  “You leave yourself open to check,” Kurt said.

  “Only if you give up one of your pieces,” Gregorovich said and then downed the shot.

  Kurt studied the board carefully. He moved the rook to a spot next to the pawn, protecting them both, instead of threatening Gregorovich with check, which the Russian could have easily escaped.

  “You don’t understand this game, I think,” Gregorovich said. “You play defensively, protecting your pawns. This game, like life, is all about attacking.”

  Gregorovich took another of Kurt’s pieces, moving his queen recklessly into danger.

  “What would you know about life?” Kurt said. “Except how to end it.”
>
  This time, Kurt reached for the bottle and poured the shots. He allowed his hand to shake and appear unsteady.

  Gregorovich snickered. “I know that life is about finding your place in all of this madness,” he said. “Some of us find it easily, maybe you did. My path was more complicated. When I was a boy, my mother left us. My father’s temper and the back of his hand were too much for her. So, naturally, he took it out on me. When he drank, everything was my fault. When he didn’t drink, everything was my fault.”

  Gregorovich shook his head. “Somehow, I always failed him. And when I did, he would beat me. His favorite game was to force me outside and make me stand in the ice water of the bog. It came up to my thighs and it numbed my legs, and then he would whip me with a belt until the water turned red or until my knees buckled and I fell in it. I couldn’t feel my lower half, but I could feel every inch of that belt on my back with heightened awareness.”

  Kurt looked up from the board.

  “One day,” Gregorovich said, “I decided I would stay up. Stay up until he killed me, and then I’d be free. I stood as he thrashed me and I kept myself from falling. It infuriated him more until eventually he charged into the water and tried to force me under. This triggered something in me. Something I had never felt. I had forced him to change. And so instead of letting him drown me, I fought him. For the first time ever, I raised my fist to him. And when I’d beaten him to a bloody mess, I took that belt and strangled the life from the miserable bastard.”

  Kurt remained silent.

  “The look in his eyes,” Gregorovich continued. “The look in his eyes as he died. It wasn’t shock. It wasn’t fear. It was pride. For the first time in my life, and the last time in his, I had impressed him.”

  Kurt tipped back another shot of vodka. “Why are you telling me this touching family story?”

  “Because from that day on, I knew who I was,” Gregorovich said coldly. “From that day on, I understood life. It revealed what I was meant to be. An assassin. A killer. It is my gift. I have never failed at an assignment. Never failed to destroy the selected target. It is perfection. I am perfection.”