Raine and King both frowned.
“Which is what?”
“Nathan, Ben,” he paused for emphasis, glancing from one to the other. “The Moon Mask doesn’t just threaten the future of humanity. It threatens its past.”
56:
Phoenix Rising
Airborne over the Pacific
King’s breath caught in his throat. “What?” he gasped.
“The Moon Mask threatens humanity’s past,” Langley repeated. “The whole tapestry of time.”
“What are you talking about?” Raine demanded.
“Time travel, Nate,” the older man replied.
Raine stared at him with his intense blue eyes for several long seconds. Then he burst out laughing. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
King leaned forward on his chair, suddenly more interested. Whilst he had participated in the conversation to this point, his gaze had been distant, his thoughts trapped beneath the waves with the spirit of the woman he loved. But now, all such distance evaporated in an instant. He thought about Kha’um, about his own epic quest across the globe to reunite the pieces of the Moon Mask. All to save his people. All to save the woman he loved.
To save her from ever dying in the first place.
“He’s not kidding, Nate,” he told his friend, his eyes focussed on Langley. The man seemed older now than he had back in New York. He had made a decision to leave behind the life he had known, rightly or wrongly, for a cause that he believed in.
Langley spun on his chair and began tapping the touch-screen computer affixed to the bulkhead of the plane. After a few clicks, he brought up a file. The very first page displayed the emblazoned logo of a bird bursting out of searing flames.
“Project Phoenix,” he announced, “began life in the early forties as a last ditch effort to combat the overwhelming forces of imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. It was, quite literally, to be the re-birth of America. But, in reality, it began far earlier, drawing on the research of some of the world’s greatest scientific minds. Much of it was based on research which the CIA confiscated from Nikola Tesla’s estate after his death. Research he conducted on the fragment of the Moon Mask which had made its way from Africa, into the hands of the early Freemasons- a totally different organisation to the group I represent, I might add - before being . . . procured by the ‘mad scientist.’ Only that mad scientist was not as mad as history has made him out to be. He drew up the blueprints for the first scientifically plausible time machine; blueprints which the next generation of scientists, headed by one Albert Einstein, elaborated on, culminating in the construction of the USS Eldridge.”
He proceeded to tell Raine and King about the Philadelphia Experiment and its failed attempts to transport the USS Eldridge back in time so that it could eliminate America’s enemies before they ever became a threat.
“It failed,” he finally concluded. “And eventually the D-Day landings saw the beginning of the end of Hitler’s regime, and the A-bomb subdued Japan. The war was over. But the U.S. government still wanted to control the power of time. And so Phoenix thrived. It moved from one establishment to the next, one generation to the next; from Philadelphia to Area 51 in the late forties, early fifties; Long Island in New York to Montauk Air Force Station in the eighties and nineties. And, most recently, Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado- right underneath NORAD.”
“That’s incredible,” King whispered.
“At the heart of the experiment has always been that single shard of the Moon Mask,” Langley continued, tapping on the touch-screen computer to bring up the schematic of a ship. The Eldridge. Even to King’s untrained eye he knew there was something wrong with the image. There were no giant guns mounted to the deck, none of the fixtures and fittings he would have expected from a WWII-era warship. Instead, pipes, wires and conduits snaked around the central superstructure, down through the decks to a long chamber running through the very centre of the ship.
“This is the Eldridge as she looked in the early forties.” Langley pointed to a room at the aft of the ship, four decks down. “This was her generator room.” He tapped on it and that section of the screen enlarged. Again, there were more pipes and wires trailing from two enormous-looking computers and hooked up to a frame built directly in front of the opening to the ‘tube’ he’d noticed running the length of the ship. A few more taps of the screen and Langley over-laid black and white photographs of the room.
King felt his breath catch in his throat when he noticed what was in one of them.
“The Bouda mask.”
Stripped of the façade which had been crafted around the meteoritic metal fashioned long ages ago by his ancestors, the single lump of metal was held by two clamps in the centre of the frame. The frame, he now noticed, was likewise attached to the walls of the tube.
“The mask is the cog in the machine around which the entire time machine works,” Langley announced.
“Oh, come on,” Raine shook his head. “You know I’m happy to think a little out of the box. I’m happy to concede that the tachyon radiation did . . . something to Benny’s head to help him find the mask. ESP, Remote Viewing, whatever . . . But time travel?”
“Einstein’s general theory of relativity is considered the best and most accurate theory for space and time ever developed,” Langley replied. “And Einstein himself admitted that there is nothing in the laws of physics to prevent time travel. Time is a fourth dimension and, while it may be extremely difficult to put time travel into practice, it is not impossible. In the seventies, a New Zealand scientist named Roy Kerr developed a theoretical time-travel model utilising a black hole. In the eighties, a team from CalTech set out to prove that time travel was impossible. All they ended up doing was admitting that with the right technology - most importantly, a power source far beyond anything yet developed – there was nothing preventing it. Well established, respectable scientists have published their findings in leading scientific journals. The highest profile experts have gone on record as supporting the theory. In this new age of quantum physics, Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest minds of the modern world, ate humble pie and admitted that a statement he made long ago denouncing the theory was wrong. His exact quote was ‘time travel maybe possible, but it is not practical.’”
Langley sighed and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his temples. “Trust me, Nathan. Until a few days ago, I consigned the idea to Star Trek and Doctor Who as well. But since then, I’ve read this file,” he tapped the computer, “inside and out. I’ve read the theories and the science and the research which the CIA has been amassing from unsuspecting academics for seventy years. I scoured the internet, reading everything I could about time travel. And all I’ve managed to find is support for the idea.”
“For the idea, maybe,” Raine allowed. “But you yourself said we don’t have the technology to-”
Langley tapped the computer screen and it flicked on to show a different image of the same ship. Only this wasn’t some scanned-in copy of seventy-year-old blueprints. This was an animated three-dimensional wire-framed graphic of the same ship, only far more modern looking.
“In the forties,” Langley said. “The theory was sound. The technology was . . . chunky and archaic by our standards. But the Philadelphia Experiment wasn’t a complete failure. The Eldridge did indeed travel through time by 0.002 seconds. Unfortunately, it also travelled through space, altering the molecular state of both the ship and her crew and depositing her hundreds of miles away.” He looked intently at Raine and King. “But that was well over half a century ago. Computers the size of a small house couldn’t perform half the functions that most of our P.C.s can do. We’ve broken the sound barrier. We’ve put a man on the moon. We’ve cloned animals. We’ve created quantum computers that can calculate trillions of processes in a fraction of a second.”
Langley tapped the computer screen again. The image stopped spinning and zoomed in on a close up cut-away image of a vastly updated Eldridge.
This vessel was no World War Two-era relic. While the basic shape and style remained the same, all the trailing cables and conduits had gone, giving her a sleek and menacing persona. Except for the engine room, King also realised that almost the entire inner section of the ship had been torn away, leaving her an almost hollow hulk except for a few work stations and laboratories to the aft of the ship.
“She’s been refitted with the most cutting edge technology available. Quantum computers control what is essentially a web of microscopic nano-fibres which have been fused to every last millimetre of the hull and tied into this.” He tapped the screen and the hollowed out tunnel that took up almost the entire space of the three hundred and six foot long destroyer enlarged and a graphic ‘skin’ was transplanted over it, displaying its features.
“This is a particle accelerator,” Langley explained. Both Raine and King leaned forward and peered at the image. “It is based on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.”
King couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He knew very little about the sixteen mile long LHC at Geneva but he did know that it was the largest such device in the world and had turned understanding of quantum mechanics on its head. Scientists there had even managed to capture anti-matter for an extended period of time. Yet, here he was, staring at a miniaturised version built into a United States destroyer.
“They had the technology,” Langley concluded. “But they didn’t have the energy source they needed to open a wormhole.”
“A wormhole?” King asked. He’d heard the phrase thrown around in science fiction movies but knew little else.
“Stephen Hawking, among others, suggests that time is a fourth dimension and that it, like everything in the other three, is ‘puckered’ with holes and crevices. These crevices appear everywhere. Even on the smoothest surface imaginable, when you get down to the sub-atomic level it is wrinkled and broken. The fourth dimension, time, is just like this. Full of holes. Tiny holes that even the world’s most powerful microscope cannot see. But they are there.” He checked that his audience was still following. King knew the man was no scientist and was merely detailing what he himself had recently learned.
“We’re talking about the quantum level here. Smaller than molecules or atoms, billionths of trillionths of centimetres wide. But they’re not just holes. They’re tunnels, constantly forming, collapsing and reforming again. Tunnels through space . . . and through time. They’ve been scientifically proven to exist, at least in the realms of quantum theory, and it has been suggested that if captured and enlarged, that tunnel through time would be large enough for a person . . . or even a ship, to travel through.”
“Oookaaay,” Raine said, his voice still full of scepticism. “So how do you capture a wormhole?”
“By bombarding it with exotic matter with either negative or imaginary energy density.”
Raine rolled his eyes. “Wish I hadn’t asked.”
“Think of it . . . think of the ‘empty’ space in front of you as a solid piece of sandstone,” Langley suggested. “Now, you find a tiny crack in the otherwise perfect stone. You turn on a power-washer to its most intense jet and pound away at that crack. Bit by bit, that crack enlarges until- boom!” he smacked his hands together, shocking everyone. “It wrenches apart completely! What are you left with? A hole. And, if that crack ran all the way through the piece of sandstone, a tunnel.”
Langley turned back to the computer screen and brought up another image. This was a theoretical image of a tunnel, two wide throats on either side connected via a thin tube. While the numbers and letters that made up the equations written all around the image made no sense to King, there was no doubting the representation of small arrows aimed at one of the mouths.
“In 1943 in Philadelphia,” Langley said, “they hooked the single piece of the Moon Mask up to a very crude particle accelerator which collected the tachyons – exotic matter – and fired them into one of these wormholes. It opened and swallowed the entire ship, but there weren’t enough tachyons to keep it open. It collapsed around them, ending in disaster.”
King felt a sense of dread race down his spine at the same time as a fire of hope was stoked in his heart. “But now they have all the pieces of the mask.”
“They have five times the amount of tachyons,” Raine finished for him. He glanced up at his former mentor. “Will that be enough?”
Langley nodded solemnly. “From what I’ve read, it will be more than enough to maintain a stable wormhole inside the ship. The nano-fibres will carry the effect across the ship. They will have a fully functioning time machine. They will have the ability to travel into the past and alter history to suit themselves. They will have the ability to extinguish lives years before they are born. They will have the ability to conquer Russia before it became a threat, to annex China when they are weakest.”
“I thought that would suit you and your little band of sociopaths,” Raine snarled.
Langley’s eyes were hard. “We aim to protect the world, to maintain the status quo. Do I want America to conquer the entire world? No more so than I wanted Nazi Germany to. No more so than I want Russia to. We’re talking about playing god here. It’s one thing to take a life . . . of a soldier,” he said. “Even of a civilian. But it is quite another to wipe a life from existence altogether. To squat out the light of a soul before it is born into this world, to remove its memory, its legacy. It’s right to exist, to have existed and to go on existing.”
King noticed Raine staring hard at his former commander, his face a mask of betrayal. First Nadia. Now Langley.
“So cut to the chase,” he said. “What do you want from me and Benny?”
Langley frowned, as though the answer was the most obvious in the world. Indeed, King supposed, it was.
“I want you to help us,” he stated. “Right now, the Eldridge is preparing to travel back in time and unravel the tapestry of history. I’ve done what I can so that if we fail they may still be stopped, but the truth is we are humanity’s last line of defence here. This is what the ‘group’ was developed for: to prevent mankind from self-annihilation. And if that ship succeeds with its mission, who knows what might happen? We all know the old grandfather paradox. You go back in time, kill your grandfather and prevent yourself from ever being born. But then how did you go back and kill him?” He shook his head. “There are theories of alternate universes, parallel timelines, you name it. But one way or another, the world as it is today will cease to exist if we don’t stop Gibbs. Time is a tapestry, made up of infinite threads sewn into place. You pull on one thread, Nate, and the entire tapestry falls apart.”
Raine and Langley stared at each other for long moments. Whatever happened, King knew, their friendship was over, another casualty of the Moon Mask. Another betrayal.
“You managed to eliminate the rest of Bill’s team,” Langley said.
“That’s because you sent them to kill us!” Raine snapped.
“I sent them to protect the Moon Mask. To destroy it.” His words brought King up short. After everything, were they really just going to destroy it? And if they did, then what about Sid?
“We’ll help you,” King spoke up, breaking into the other men’s tense moment. Nevertheless, Raine’s eyes were cold and penetrating as they bore into Langley.
“We’ll help you,” he echoed. “But then you let us go. And if I ever see you again,” he added threateningly, “I will kill you.”
57:
The Eye of the Storm
Airborne over the Pacific
“Sir, we’re approaching the GPS coordinates you gave me.”
In the rear hold of the Black Cat, Raine, King, Langley and Bill turned at the sound of the pilot’s voice.
Following the tense moments as Langley laid his cards on the table, the four men had proceeded to suit up. They all now wore black commando gear, Kevlar vests, and had numerous weapon’s strapped to their persons. Even King now looked relatively comfortable in the milita
ry garb, a P-90 slunk over his shoulder, hand grenades stashed in his vest and a handgun strapped to his leg. But it wasn’t so much the outfit that made the man who ordinarily deplored violence look different. It was his eyes. Through the pain that was evident, Raine also noticed a hard determination quite unlike anything he had seen in him before.
A thirst for revenge.
“Shit,” the pilot cursed. “I’ve got multiple radar contacts converging on the Eldridge’s position.”
Langley pushed forward to look through the front window beyond the pilot’s head. The storm clouds had thickened as they had flown deeper into the heart of the Pacific and they streamed across the Black Cat’s nose as the plane shot towards the coordinates he had discerned from the Phoenix File.
“Okay, drop us below the cloud cover,” he ordered.
Peering over Langley’s shoulder, Raine felt the shift in pressure as the plane began a gradual descent. He knew from first-hand experience that the plane was all but invisible to radar and to the naked eye; nevertheless he kept glancing at the radar panel in the centre of the cockpit’s control board. On it he could see six stationary ‘blips’ at sea level which he presumed was the Eldridge and her escort ships. But, moving towards them from the west was a mass of small dots, moving fast at altitude.
Langley’s earlier comment came back to him. I’ve done what I can so that if we fail they may still be stopped. He felt a shiver of dread snake up his spine.
“What have you done, Alex?”
There was a lengthy pause while Langley continued to stare out the window. At last, the plane dropped below the clouds and the black expanse of the world’s largest ocean opened up beneath them. With the storm clouds blocking out the stars, the void below them looked like the infinite blackness of ultimate despair. The only lights on the water came from the six United States Navy warships, a Carrier Strike Group, Raine realised. Their running lights flickered upon the chop of the significant waves thrown up by the increasingly powerful wind.
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