by Greig Beck
The scientist’s footsteps echoed in the silent corridor as he returned to the main laboratory. The Jamshid II facility under Arak had been designed differently from the complex once hidden beneath the ruins at Persepolis. The magnificent silver sphere was still there, for blasting uranium hexafluoride gas molecules to a speed-of-light escape velocity, but the separated Uranium 235, once the objective of the enrichment process, was now a discarded waste product. The purpose of the new Jamshid facility was to explore and refine the molecule collisions themselves.
The main chamber had been stripped of all electronic monitoring and recording equipment; it was bare save for the gleaming silver sphere at its centre. All the equipment and personnel had been moved to a specially designed secondary command centre 500 feet from the sphere chamber. As there would be no residual radiation remaining after each test run, the technicians would be able to re-enter quickly and replace any lost equipment in a matter of days. The facility’s personnel should be safe this time. Only unfeeling electronic eyes and ears provided the sensory feedback. Lead-lined panelling and concrete reinforcing surrounded the room, causing a striking echo effect when even the simplest of tasks was performed there. The new equipment was more advanced – a benefit of the president’s increased budget for the project, which he was now calling a ‘divine event’. The in-lab cameras were equipped with high-speed drives and extremely sensitive media to record images at 10,000 frames per second, and sound could be analysed over the super and subsonic wavelengths. Al Janaddi was expecting there would be more data to study this time around.
He looked over to where a technician was painting a white line all the way around the sphere and shivered as he recalled his recent conversation with President Moshaddam. ‘I need you to install seating for, say, a dozen martyrs in front of your beautiful sphere,’ the president had ordered.
‘Er, you mean in the observation room, my President?’
‘No, I do not. I mean in the sphere room. Close to the device itself.’
Al Janaddi was glad the conversation was taking place over the phone so Moshaddam could not see his face. He closed his eyes for a moment as he remembered the body of Professor Shihab. He knew what proximity to the sphere could do to human tissue. He also knew what the testing of live subjects would do to any hope of international recognition for his work. He prayed that he wouldn’t be ordered to sit in one of those seats himself.
‘As you wish, my President,’ he’d replied. What else could he have said?
Now Al Janaddi wondered again about the men and women who would be chosen to behold the opening of the ‘Gateway to Allah’ as the president was now calling it. Those souls were about to be transported somewhere, be it heaven or hell. The image of the misshapen corpse of Dr Shihab leapt into his mind, and with it came the taste of bile in the back of his throat.
THIRTEEN
Hatzerim Air Base, Southern Israel
The B2 Spirit came to a halt on the shimmering runway, lowering slightly on its wheel arches to rest like a giant dark bird of prey. The radar-repellent coating ensured there was little reflection from the sun, and darkened windows and a sleek shape gave it a swift and futuristic appearance. The modified Spirit, with a wingspan of 170 feet, dwarfed the smaller Israeli F161 fighters that crowded the edges of the runway.
The B2 normally carried a terrifying armoury; depending on its role in battle, it could pack up to eighty 500-pound conventional weapons or half a dozen nuclear-tipped city-busters. Today, its cargo was only marginally less lethal – five elite soldiers jumped from the darkened interior and walked across the tarmac. With their insignia-free uniforms and hats pulled down over dark glasses, it was plain the men weren’t there for sightseeing.
An Israeli soldier standing outside what looked like a squat pillbox saluted the HAWCs without looking at them and opened the heavy glass door. Once inside, Alex was slightly surprised to see that the small building was heavily fortified and loaded with surveillance lenses. It was otherwise bare save for a metal door leading to an elevator. The soldier pressed the elevator button and turned on his heel, the tempered glass door clicking shut behind him.
With a hiss the elevator door slid open. Alex stepped in first, followed by Sam and Hex. Rocky and Irish brought up the rear, but both stepped forward at the same time and for a brief second both pairs of broad shoulders became wedged in the opening.
‘Finished?’ Alex said to the two men.
Rocky stood aside and made a waving gesture with his arm. Irish stepped in, mumbling under his breath.
‘I feel safer with you two here,’ Sam said, and winked at Rocky, who grinned. Irish ignored them.
The elevator dropped rapidly, and when the doors hissed open they revealed a white corridor and two more soldiers standing behind a desk. One nodded at the HAWCs; the other just gave Alex a flat stare.
Sam elbowed Alex in the ribs, gesturing upwards with his chin. ‘Blast shield,’ he said softly.
Alex looked up and saw embedded in the ceiling behind the Israelis an inch-thick line of steel. The Israelis could seal in or out anything they wanted to. Such is life in the Middle East, he thought.
The nodder spoke. ‘Captain Hunter?’
‘Yes,’ Alex said. He didn’t salute or move to shake the man’s hand.
‘There are rooms set up for you and your men. You alone are to attend a briefing in one hour.’
‘Two of us will be attending,’ Alex said. ‘First Lieutenant Reid will be joining me.’ He motioned to the hulking HAWC standing just behind him.
The nodder turned his head slightly and said something softly in Hebrew to the man next to him. The man grunted in response and the nodder spoke to Alex again, a small down-turned smile on his face. ‘I’m sorry, there are specific instructions -’
‘Bachur, ani yode’a ivrit ein be’ ayot.’ Sam cut the man off with a single, softly spoken sentence in perfect Hebrew.
The nodder’s cheeks reddened and he said, ‘Please follow me, sir.’
Alex looked at Sam and raised his eyebrows.
‘Just called him a kid,’ Sam said, ‘and told him I understand Hebrew.’
Alex nodded. ‘Good. We’re not here to make friends.’
Outside their rooms, the man stopped and turned again to the HAWCs. ‘Captain Hunter, I will be back to collect you in one hour.’
‘Us; you’ll be collecting us in one hour,’ Alex replied.
Exactly fifty-nine minutes later, there was a knock on the door of Alex’s room. The nodder was back.
Alex felt pretty good after a shower and half an hour’s rest, and as he and Sam followed the young Israeli down the corridor he could feel all his senses opening to the building around him. In one hand he held a sealed folder; the other he placed against the wall a number of times as they walked – he could feel the vibrations of a lot of machinery and people through the mortar and reinforcing. Pretty sizeable base hidden below the desert, he thought.
They reached a double set of white doors and the nodder knocked once and turned the handle. He stood back and gave his familiar nod before disappearing back down the corridor.
Alex pushed the door open and stepped into the large room, followed by Sam. It held two desks, one with several closed folders on its surface, the other with a plate of sandwiches. Two people stood there waiting, both silent.
Alex looked first at the man – he was tall, all angles and elbows, and wore a pair of nerdy wire spectacles. He was young and clearly nervous; his fingers danced in constant motion on the end of scarecrow-thin arms. Alex looked away before the kid passed out from the tension.
The other Israeli was a young woman – also tall, moderately attractive, no make-up. She didn’t need it – strength and health radiated from her clear eyes and olive cheeks. She didn’t seem nervous at all and scrutinised the Americans with a confident gaze.
She walked towards the HAWCs with her hand outstretched. ‘Good afternoon. I am Adira Senesh, and this is my colleague, Dr Zachariah Shomron. W
e will be assisting you on your project.’
Alex shook her hand and almost smiled; her palm was strong and callused with the grip of a weapon carrier. Their eyes locked – no movement, no flinching or blinking; each seemed to recognise the potential lethality in the other. Adira nodded and released his hand, turning to Sam to shake his hand as well.
When Alex took Zachariah Shomron’s hand, the young man could not look him in the eye. His nerves became even more noticeable through various tics and twitches. The two Israelis could not have been more different, Alex thought. He remembered the Hammer saying that one would be a Mossad torpedo. No prizes for guessing which one.
Alex looked around the small room. ‘The general’s not joining us?’
‘No,’ the woman said. ‘We are authorised to speak on his and Israel’s behalf.’ She waited a second, presumably to see if Alex was going to have a problem with that, then led the two HAWCs to sit down. Sam immediately attacked the plate of sandwiches.
‘Events are moving quickly, Captain Hunter,’ the woman said, ‘and may be more complex and serious than we thought.’
She turned to her nervous colleague and said something rapidly in Hebrew. Zach looked anxious; he was obviously receiving some sort of instruction. Alex could tell Sam was listening to her words; he caught the lieutenant’s eye and gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. The big HAWC got it: listen, but don’t let on that you understand.
Zachariah Shomron gulped a few times, cleared his throat and then began to brief the HAWCs on the scientific details of the mission. He spoke for two hours, his confidence building as he got onto familiar territory. He described the strength of the gamma pulse and its potential emanation point, and flagged the unusual lack of any fallout plus the puzzling sudden disappearance of any latent emissions. He also told them that Israeli intelligence services had reported that the Iranians had recovered a heavily irradiated body many miles from the initial site, believed to belong to one of the scientists involved in the test.
‘In my opinion, the signatures of the radiation pulse do not fit any geophysical creation – natural or man-made,’ he told the HAWCs. ‘They do, however, have the characteristics of a gravitational entity called a black hole. I believe that either by default or design, the Iranians created a gravity event – something like a miniature black hole – in their laboratory. It probably absorbed the entire facility and then evaporated before it fell to the centre of the planet under its own weight.’
Sam had been listening with his mouth hanging open. He shook his head slightly now and leaned forward. ‘Dr Shomron, on a recent project, I had the pleasure of working with the scientists in Geneva as they prepared to test-fire their massive particle collider. The scientists explained to me the principles behind high-energy collisions and the theoretical creation of strange new particles, possibly even mini black holes, but the technologies required are, in a word, massive. The facility in Geneva is just over sixteen miles long, clad in reinforced concrete and steel, and took over twenty years to build out in the open. The Iranians couldn’t duplicate that on the surface, let alone underground. They just don’t have the technological expertise.’
Zach pointed at Sam’s chest as though awarding him a medal for asking the right questions. ‘You’re absolutely right, Lieutenant. But that assumption is based on standard high-energy collision technology using rotational speed over distance as the medium for particle impact. There are other ways to create the necessary speed without the distance – you just need to find a stable acceleration trigger. I believe that somehow, some way, the Iranians found that trigger.’
He pushed his spectacles back up his nose, one foot tapping restively on the carpet, as if it were trying to talk the rest of his body into getting up and taking a walk.
Adira spoke to Alex. ‘The pressing importance is described by two critical pieces of information.’ She held up a finger: ‘One, we now know that Natanz, although a working enrichment facility, was just a front. That facility must have cost them billions of rials, but they were willing to sacrifice it to the United Nations to hide what they were doing at Persepolis, the site of the powerful gamma pulse. We believe that the Persepolis facility is now destroyed or has suffered a serious set-back. And two,’ she held up a second finger, ‘we believe they have another site, which they have rushed into full production. Whatever they did at Persepolis, they liked it and are now trying to reproduce it.’
Alex noticed her fingers had now clenched into a fist. ‘But reproduce what,’ he said. ‘A black hole? Why? What can they possibly do with it? My understanding is that these things weigh thousands of tons and disappear almost as soon as they are created – how does one contain or use something like that? What could they gain from creating this type of entity?’ Alex had his own theories, but needed to get the Israelis to cut to the chase.
This time Zachariah cut Adira off. ‘You’re right, Captain, a black hole just a little bigger than this room would weigh as much as our planet. But in just ten seconds it could output more gamma radiation than the sun could in ten billion years. You don’t need to create a large black hole – and you wouldn’t want to, as even a small one could interact with regular matter and start a chain reaction that would continue to devour the planetary substance until Earth was destroyed. But that energy source, that magnificent energy source – just imagine if it could be harnessed. It would render all other energies and fuels obsolete. Future wars will be fought over fuel, or lack of it. This power could be a primary reason for making war redundant!’
Zachariah Shomron was almost bouncing in his seat with excitement. Adira placed her hand on his forearm and squeezed – perhaps to settle the young man down, Alex thought, or cut him off before he said something she didn’t want him to.
‘You asked what the Iranians could do with this type of thing, Captain Hunter?’ Adira said. ‘Well, how about a type of particle-beam weapon directing a 10,000-sievert burst of gamma radiation? They could destroy anything with that beam – the only thing that would stop it would be ten feet of solid lead or the curve of the earth. Everything else it touched would either disintegrate or be carbonised.’ Adira’s eyes burned as she spoke; not with Zachariah Shomron’s scientific curiosity, but with anger.
‘You seem well informed for a linguistics expert, Ms Senesh,’ Alex said, keeping his gaze flat as his eyes met hers.
Before Adira could respond, Zachariah bounced to his feet. ‘And what about space travel, time travel or even interdimensional travel? Black holes aren’t just universal garbage compactors – we still don’t know what really happens when you enter the singularity. Does matter contacting with dark matter cancel you out? Are you simply absorbed, crushed, or do you go somewhere else… or some when else – a different time, a different universe perhaps? All we know is that once something passes through a black hole, it exits our universe. In fact, in 1921 Kal-’
Sam held up one hand. ‘Dr Shomron, if you’re going to talk in detail about Kaluza-Klein or superstring theory, you’re going to lose us. Can you break it down a little further?’
The young Israeli steepled his fingers, enjoyment showing at the corners of his mouth. ‘I was, sorry. Okay, um… in the most basic terms, a black hole is defined by an inner and outer perimeter. The outer rim of the black hole, really its definition, is called the event horizon; past this point there is no return… of anything. Black holes really aren’t black, they have no colour – the blackness is actually the absence of colour. The absence of anything really – colour, light, heat, everything. Once past the event horizon, you enter the actual entity, the singularity.’
Alex opened his folder and retrieved a small pile of eight by ten glossy photographs. He held the first one up to the Israelis – it showed the biological mess that had once been the German scientist Hoeckler. Adira didn’t flinch, but Zachariah paled.
Alex tapped the gruesome image. ‘How does this fit in? This is, or was, a German national by the name of Rudolf Hoeckler. We know he was
working with the Iranians on a secret uranium-enrichment program, but it seems he got himself caught up in some type of accident. His body was recovered just outside of Colorado Springs – we don’t know how he got there, and we suspect Germany and Iran don’t know how he got there either – or, for that matter, that he got there at all.’
‘I… I knew Professor Hoeckler,’ Zachariah stuttered. ‘He was a brilliant physicist, and had some groundbreaking ideas on the laser enhancement of particles in the fissionable materials purification processes. In fact, the laser techniques he used… hey, that’s it! There’s your acceleration trigger – Hoeckler must have had a breakthrough. Or thought he did. This is amazing.’
Zachariah went through the photographs, nodding as though confirming what he suspected. ‘He was irradiated, right?’
‘At least 500 sieverts,’ Alex said. ‘Made a lot of people sick before he was sealed into a lead crate.’
‘Amazing. I’ve never seen this sort of physical distortion before – in fact, no one has – but I’ve read theories on it. Have you ever heard of “spaghettification”?’ Zachariah didn’t wait for an answer. ‘It’s where the atomic structure of mass is stretched by enormous gravitational tidal forces – like what’s theoretically supposed to happen when you’re falling into a black hole. Your physical fibre becomes elongated as your somatic structure comes under the influence of the most powerful gravitational force in our universe.’
‘Very interesting, Dr Shomron,’ said Alex as he put the images back in their folder. ‘That could theoretically explain his condition, but how the hell did he get onto American soil?’