“Yeah?” Romano said. “And this is supposed to mean something?”
“What it says to this aeronautical engineer is that they haven’t achieved sufficient power in the electromagnetic pulse. Not enough to totally obliterate all electrical systems.”
“So this fantasy weapon doesn’t even work?” Thorn said.
“That’s not what I’m saying.” Wingo gave Thorn a sharp look, then turned his eyes back to the gray blur of the horizon. “Between the March event and this most recent one, they’ve clearly made progress. A lot of progress in a very short time. The damage to the American flight was far greater than to the Piper Cub. What that says to me is that they’re still evolving. And at this rate of increase in their power gain, it might only be a short time before the thing is fully operational and could start bringing down planes anywhere in the world.”
At the edge of the porch a sluggish breeze sifted through the coconut palm’s big fronds. A rattle and hiss that sounded like a dying man’s final gasps.
“So what’s the plan?” Thorn said.
“Forget it.” Alexandra stood up. “Get back to your different drummer. Forget any of this happened. We’ll take it from here. But if my dad shows up again, by God, you damn well better hold on to him this time, and call us right away. Is that clear?”
Thorn managed a smile. “Happy to oblige.”
“Come on, Dan, we have to move.”
The three of them rose from the picnic table and headed for the stairs.
“And oh, yeah,” Thorn said. “Feel free to stop in anytime. Bring your friends. Maybe next time they can take off their goggles, we’ll have a party.”
Thorn tagged along down the stairs. The two cops in the lead, Wingo lagging. In the yard Thorn caught up with him, matched his stride, leaned in and said in a hushed voice, “This guy Braswell, he’s the one that built the ray gun, huh?”
Wingo halted, his lips twisting into a nasty frown. Thorn watched as Wingo slowly regained control and the look melted back into the bland countenance he’d maintained before.
“Why do you say that?”
“Oh, just a wild guess.”
Wingo brought a smile to his lips but there wasn’t any fun in his voice.
“You’d do well to keep tying your little flies, Mr. Thorn. And stay out of deeper waters.”
Thirteen
Sugar and Thorn shared a pot of coffee, watching the low clouds dissolve, some ragged patches of blue beginning to appear. A heron drifted in and touched down along the shore and began its slow, regal prowl.
Thorn put down his mug and reached into the pocket of his shorts and drew out a plastic baggie with a knife inside.
“Christ, Thorn, that’s withholding evidence. A felony, man.”
“Hey, I found it after they left.”
“Yeah, sure you did.”
“Those people didn’t inspire a lot of confidence in me.”
Sugarman shook his head sadly.
“You know anything about knives, Sugar?”
He took another sip from his mug. “I know a jackknife from a Bowie. That’s about my limit.”
“Mine, too. But this one. It looks familiar to me.”
“Yeah?”
“That long-haired creep I was telling you about. Johnny Braswell. Very close to the one he had.”
“You sure?”
“Not positive, no. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking.”
“That was stupid, Thorn. Just plain stupid hiding that knife.”
“I didn’t care for Wingo. Something isn’t right with his eyes.”
“But you liked the girl. I could see that.”
He smiled at Sugar.
“For a hard-ass she wasn’t bad. But I like her father more.”
“I don’t know,” Sugar said. “This ray gun thing sounds like a bunch of hooey.”
At the shoreline the heron was peering up at them as if requesting quiet.
“Oh, God, you got that look, Thorn. You got that goddamn look.”
“Hey, I liked Lawton, what can I say? We connected.”
“Where’s that sheet of paper, the nautical chart? Might be fingerprints on it.”
Thorn shook his head.
“Lawton must’ve taken it with him.”
Sugar looked out at the heron. It was stalking toward the neighbor’s property, giving up on this noisy spot.
“Well, hell,” Sugar said. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to poke around a little. I mean, purely as an intellectual exercise. To satisfy our curiosities. But that’s it.”
Thorn smiled.
“I was thinking about Cappy Adams.”
Sugarman hummed his approval.
“Smart,” he said.
Thorn watched a flats boat hotdogging across Blackwater Sound, putting a white seam across the flat silver surface. Everyone had them now. The new fad. Fast little skimmers that could take their owners way up onto the fragile flats where they could do more damage in a few seconds than could be undone in years.
“All right then,” Sugarman said. “But just to satisfy our curiosity, nothing more.”
“I have to take a quick shower first, put on a fresh T-shirt. I don’t want to go out looking like some beach bum.”
Cappy Adams lived on the ocean side of Lower Matecumbe in an orange-and-blue A-frame that looked across a narrow canal at a tangle of mangroves. The second Sugarman and Thorn stepped out of the Chevrolet, a whining cloud of mosquitoes engulfed them and the swarm grew thicker as they mounted the metal stairway. While Sugar fanned and swatted, Thorn rapped on the frame of the screen door.
“Friend or foe!” Cappy yelled from somewhere deep in the house.
“Two friends,” Thorn called back. “No foes.”
“Enter!”
The house consisted of one large room and a small loft. A half dozen skylights provided the lighting. Cappy was at the far end of the room, smoking a pipe, hunched over one of his battlefields. He was shirtless and barefoot, wearing only a pair of old blue overalls, his thick mat of white chest hair coiling over the edge of the denim. He wore his gray hair in a braided ponytail that hung to the middle of his back. On the upper side of his left forearm the tattoo of a red-haired bombshell had faded to flesh tones.
He looked up at them and smiled, puffed on his pipe, and bent back to his work.
The kitchen area was neat and gleaming and in one corner of the room a recliner was aimed at a small TV set, while the rest of the open area was crammed with a dozen tables made of plywood sheets lying atop stacks of concrete blocks. Spread out on each of them was a miniature scene of war. Sand tables, they were called. Half-inch tall soldiers with muskets, others with swords or rapiers, and still others with M-16s or long rifles with fixed bayonets. Cappy used papier-mâché and balsa wood, pipe cleaners and duct tape to build his own mountains and boulders and bridges and form his own trees and shrubs and bombed-out buildings.
From years of crafting fishing flies, Cappy had mastered lifelike reproductions. He molded the rifles and swords and cannons out of bits of modeling clay, whittled muskets and shields from wood or scraps of plastic. Everything was perfectly in scale, and every last belt buckle and helmet cover and uniform was excruciatingly accurate. Near the corner of each table was a brass plate with the name of each scene: THE BATTLE OF CULLODEN, THE BATTLE OF STIRLING BRIDGE, MASSACRE IN THE PASSES, THE ATTACK ON TARANTO, FREDERICKSBURG, and ANTIETAM. The room reeked of glue and mineral spirits and acrylic paint.
Though he’d long admired Cappy’s skill and liked him personally, Thorn always felt uneasy in this room. Maybe it was because the grim tableaux struck him as even more grim for their absence of wounds or even a dot of imitation blood. This was war without penalty, an elaborate exercise in intellectual sport.
“Gentlemen, come in. See my latest.”
Cappy was using a pair of tweezers to position a miniature Confederate flag on the grass near the outstretched arms of a fallen rebel soldier. Bodies were strewn three and four deep alon
g the rocky banks of a stream that formed the border between a wide green meadow and a dense woods. Peeking out from behind almost every tree and several boulders were the Union troops, rifles aimed at the growing pile of dead.
“Battle of Peachtree Creek,” Cappy said. “Just outside Atlanta in July 1864. The rebs threw a brigade at Pap Thomas’s fifty thousand troops that were part of the force surrounding Atlanta. This is the right flank of one regiment that was destroyed. Seven men were killed in this little battle alone while trying to raise their flag. Color-bearers. Those were the true believers. Wave the flag, get everyone charged up. So they’re out there, unarmed, easy targets, drawing a lot of fire, because if they go down, the fighting spirit of the rest of the troops gets dampened. On this particular day, seven men were slaughtered just trying to wave their flag.”
Thorn and Sugar gave the seven a moment of silence.
Cappy drew on his pipe and let loose the smoke, which hung above the battlefield like the fog of departing spirits.
Cappy Adams had been fresh out of military school when he took his first command, a tank brigade that was ordered to mop up the straggling German resistance after D day. Turned out to be a lot more resistance than anyone expected, a hell of a lot more mopping up. Cappy rarely spoke of his military exploits, but whatever he’d done in those few months after D day had bumped him up from lieutenant to major. When he retired at forty-five, he was a full bird colonel.
“Normally what I do, I try to think my way back to the day of each of these battles, put myself in the place of the commander, and see if there’s something I could’ve done differently with the information available to him at the time. I’m playing Monday-morning quarterback, yeah, but I try to stay disciplined, pretend I don’t know the things the commander would’ve had no way of knowing. But with this battle, Christ, I can’t find a goddamn thing I would’ve done differently except to turn tail and get the hell back to my cotton plantation. It was suicide, plain and simple.”
“Fifty thousand, that’s a lot of men in one place,” Thorn said.
Cappy blew another cloud of smoke.
“Armies weren’t always that large,” he said. “Thirteen hundred years ago the king of Wessex had it all broken down. One to seven men were considered simple thieves. Seven to thirty-five was a band—you know, Robin Hood and his merry bunch, that sort of thing. Thirty-six and above, now that was all it took to qualify as an army. But that was seven hundred A.D., before we got so civilized and could put fifty thousand men in the same uniform in the same meadow on the same July afternoon.”
Cappy nudged the miniature Confederate flag an inch closer to the fallen soldier. Just beyond his grasp.
“And check this one out.”
Cappy led them to another table that was heavily forested; a steep hill reared up in the center of the table. Dozens of tiny tanks and other military vehicles were distributed around the base of the hill.
“Here’s one I’m still wrestling with. Hitler sends the entire Forty-eighth Panzer Corps to chop off Patton’s neck after the breakout. But the Krauts can’t take Hill 314 at Mortain. Old Hickory—that’s the U.S. Thirtieth Infantry Division—only has one battalion on that hill, without any anti-tank weapons.”
Cappy pointed out the array of lightly armored troops hiding among the trees on the top of the hill.
“Now, Kampfgruppe Ullrich does its job and takes the steep southwestern quadrant of the hill here in hand-to-hand combat at two in the morning. But Kampfgruppe Fick doesn’t launch a coordinated attack up the road on the shallow east face. It just sits there. Now why’d they do that? The experts think Fick was afraid to go up that road because of the heavy fog. Afraid of an ambush, they say. But I’m thinking, no, would the SS be afraid of a little fog? I don’t think so. But let’s say their attached armor support got lost in the haze and didn’t make it on time, then I can see those panzer grenadiers waiting for daylight. But of course, by then it was too late. It’s just another forgotten battlefield in Normandy, but that fog changed a lot of lives. It may have even had a small effect on the eventual outcome of the war. A little thing like that. Moisture in the air. Disastrous dew point.”
Thorn stared at the elaborate replica, imagining that small hilltop swarming with troops, men full of righteous belief in their gods and their leaders, considering for a few seconds the absurd sequences of luck and accident that so often nudged the human race in some new direction.
“So you boys stop over for a history lesson or just want to bum a beer?”
“Beer would be nice,” Sugarman said.
“Two would be better,” said Thorn.
They followed Cappy over to the kitchen. He set the tweezers down on the counter, got out three Budweisers and twisted off the caps. Thorn took a deep pull and set it down beside the tweezers.
“I get the feeling beer isn’t what you came for either.”
Thorn drew a squiggly line through the sweat on his bottle.
“You ever hear of something called a HERF gun?”
Cappy eyed him for a moment. He lifted his beer and had a long swallow. He put it down and eyed Thorn some more.
“God almighty, what the hell have you boys gotten yourselves into now?”
“I don’t know yet, that’s why we’re here.”
“A HERF gun, huh? High Energy Radio Frequency, is that what you’re talking about?”
“That’s it,” Sugar said. “You know about it?”
“I know enough to say with reasonable certainty that it’s a lot of snake oil. Right up there with that rubber that never wears out, cars that run on seawater.”
“Reasonable certainty?”
Cappy’s eyes were painfully pale, bleached by the sun. Too many years on the water tracking the never-ending travels of tarpon, that silver monster he’d specialized in for the twenty years he’d guided out of Islamorada.
“Anything you know would be helpful, Cappy.”
“I live to serve,” he said.
He gave Thorn a thoughtful look. Then gazed down at Hill 314.
“It’s also called EMP, electromagnetic pulse. People have been aware of it, at least conceptually, for at least fifty years, ever since the first nuclear tests. Our boys at Livermore and Sandia labs realized the power of the electromagnetic pulse given off by the explosions and they’ve been working on ways to harden facilities against an EMP attack for decades.
“I seem to remember reading about the Sandia boys building a giant wooden platform in the desert near Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. Thing looked like a huge train trestle. They propped a B-52 bomber on it and blasted it with EMP to see what it would take to protect its electrical systems. I never heard how that one turned out, but you can bet that these days our vital nuclear weapon systems and command sites have been hardened. Jet fighters, naval equipment, everything necessary to fight a war.”
“So it does exist?”
“EMP exists, sure. But what a HERF gun is supposed to do, well, that’s another story.”
Sugarman was studying a Zulu battlefield. Row upon row of near-naked warriors with shields and axes marched headlong into row upon row of other warriors with much larger shields and spears. The guys with the smaller shields and axes were clearly winning. Shaka Zulu’s tactic was to let his troops take the first barrage of spears on their shields, suffer some casualties, then race in for close combat. Because they’d abandoned the clumsy sandals of other African warriors and had hardened their soles by running over rough terrain, they were more maneuverable in close quarters. Smaller shields, smaller hand weapons, no shoes. Those three things had led Shaka Zulu to control more land and resources than Napoleon at the height of his power.
Cappy took a slug of beer and said, “HERF supposedly works by beaming a huge burst of radio noise at its target. Fifteen to twenty megawatts. Backpack size, buy the stuff from your local Radio Shack. Any hacker or Electronics 101 student can do it. At least that’s the fantasy. Now on the official side, I know NSA has a classified prog
ram called TEMPEST that is testing the technologies in this area, but there are two big, bad problems with HERF guns. One, there’s no portable energy source powerful enough to create that kind of pulse. Oh, yeah, in the last ten years we’ve made serious advances in non-nuclear power sources, what’s called Air-Independent Propulsion. The main application is for non-nuclear submarines, to enable them to move underwater without needing to suck in air by a snorkel that pokes above the surface—and is easy to detect. The big advances are in fuel-cell technology. We’re talking enough power to propel a two-thousand-ton submarine underwater at bursts up to twenty knots per hour. Enough power perhaps to operate a HERF weapon. Main problem is size. To make a weapon like that work with current technology, you’d have to have enough fuel cells to stuff the largest moving van on the road, not a backpack.
“And the second problem is, it’s pretty damn hard to focus a pulse of that magnitude. So if you set it off, the thing would be likely to kill the person operating it and everyone in the immediate proximity. Now that would be considered a fairly serious drawback from a military perspective.”
“From almost any perspective,” Thorn said.
Sugarman said, “What if you put the gun somewhere real isolated? And you triggered it by remote control, would that work?”
“Isolated,” Thorn said. “Like out in the middle of the Everglades.”
“I don’t see why not,” Cappy said.
“So it is possible?” Thorn said.
Cappy had a sip of beer. His eyes strayed off to his sand tables, all those plastic heroes. Victory and defeat so dependent on chance. Not right or might, but just a little fog, an hour’s delay.
“Back in ’62,” he said, “when the U.S. exploded Test Shot Starfish over the mid-Pacific, it was a one-point-four-megaton nuclear blast and its electromagnetic pulse destroyed satellite equipment and blocked high-frequency radio transmission for hours all across the Pacific. Ever since then, people have been speculating about generating the pulse without setting off the explosion. Is it possible? Well, I’m no physicist, but if it was doable, then it would sure as hell change a whole lot of what we accept as reality right now. Very possibly it might alter the very nature of warfare. All the sophisticated electronics we depend on, radar, supersonic jet fighters, laser-guided missiles, that would all be useless. A bunch of strategically placed HERF guns out in the field could knock everything out and we’d be walking around in the dark. We’d be back to Shaka Zulu and his shortened ax.”
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