by Jack Du Brul
“What’s interesting, and why I mention all this, is that the name Skenderbeg is a local translation of the Ottoman, Iskender Bey or Iskender the Great. We know him as Alexander the Great. This morning I got in touch with an Ottoman history teacher at George Washington University to get some more background on Skenderbeg. It’s accepted conjecture that Skenderbeg was given this title because his military skill matched that of Alexander’s, but there’s another story, one that can’t be verified. It was rumored that he possessed a talisman of some sort that Alexander carried into battle against his greatest foe, Darius, at the Battle of Arbela in 331 B. C., and it was this talisman that allowed both men to defeat armies ten times the size of their own.”
“What sort of talisman?”
“The professor didn’t know, but I assume it’s this alembic the Janissaries mentioned. The professor said the real expert on Skenderbeg is a Turkish historian named Ibriham Ahmad. I tried calling him in Istanbul but just left a message.”
“We have a theory,” Cali said. “Before his final battle against Darius, Alexander invaded Egypt and overthrew the Persian governor. According to history the people welcomed him openly and paved the way for the construction of the city of Alexandria, home to the famous library. During his stay in Egypt he went to the temple of Zeus-Ammon someplace in the Libyan desert. It was there that the oracle revealed to him that he was the son of Ammon, Egypt’s chief deity, and was thus a god himself. A year later he defeated Darius.”
“With you so far,” Ira said.
“What if Alexander received something else when he visited the oracle, like how to procure a great weapon fit for a god? Trade along the North African coast was well established by this time. It’s possible the priests had learned about magic rocks that could incapacitate an army and told Alexander where to find them.”
“What we think,” Mercer said, “is he sent a column to Central Africa, to the site near the Scilla River. There they mined some of the plutonium ore and erected a stele to commemorate their visit.”
“We think Alexander went into battle against Darius using an improvised radiological bomb,” Cali concluded. “We checked and the Battle of Arbela was carefully staged. Both Alexander and Darius knew when and where they were going to meet. It’s possible that in the days leading up to the battle Alexander had radiological dust spread around Darius’s encampment. His people would need little more protection than rags tied around their mouths so they didn’t inhale the plutonium, which is the only way plutonium is fatal by the way, while Darius’s men would suffer radiation poisoning. Nothing lethal but enough to incapacitate them and allow Alexander’s smaller army to wipe them out.”
“Now jump forward seventeen hundred years to Albania,” Mercer added, “and you have a general who holds off a huge army for decades using a talisman that once belonged to Alexander the Great. We think Skenderbeg used his alembic to dose the Ottoman Army with enough radiation to make them too sick to fight.”
“What happened to Skenderbeg?”
“He died in 1468 of natural causes,” Mercer said. “His men held out for another decade but eventually they were overrun.”
“And his alembic?” Ira had a dubious look on his pug face.
Mercer shrugged. “I’m hoping Professor Ahmad in Istanbul can answer that.”
“Admiral Lasko,” Cali said, “I know this all sounds like a bit of a stretch but there’s a line in Chester Bowie’s journal that ties it together somewhat. He left Brazzaville right after the abduction attempt and made his way across Africa to Alexandria. In his journal he wrote that given a couple of days he could have found Alexander’s hidden tomb. He knew there was a connection between Alexander the Great and his work.”
“From there,” Mercer went on, “he caught a steamer to Europe, where he did the one thing the Nazis would never suspect. He knew he was dying and wanted to reach America as fast as possible to tell Einstein what he’d discovered. He sent Einstein a telegram from Athens and Einstein wrote him back telling him to contact Otto Hahn, a nuclear physicist who would eventually win the Nobel Prize for being the first person to split a uranium atom.”
Cali interrupted. “Hahn wasn’t a Nazi, and he refused to work on Germany’s nuclear bomb program, so when Einstein contacted him about Chester Bowie he made arrangements for Bowie’s return to the United States the fastest way possible—the airship Hindenburg.”
“Are you telling me he was on the Hindenburg when it exploded?”
Mercer nodded. “Which makes me think that maybe the conspiracy theorists are right and the zeppelin was sabotaged. Only it wasn’t about discrediting the Nazis, but about preventing Bowie from giving the sample of plutonium to Einstein.”
“Jesus,” Ira exclaimed. “Who? How?”
“My money’s on the Germans themselves and here’s why. In the last few pages of his diary Bowie said an officer came to his cabin. He killed the officer, believing that the Germans had found out who he was and weren’t going to let him off the airship. That’s when he wrote down his story and tucked it in the safe. He tied Einstein’s name to a tag on the outside and heaved it out the window. But what makes me think it was the Germans and Bowie wasn’t being paranoid is that the airship was delayed coming into Lakehurst because of a storm. But what if the captain was ordered to wait because the Nazi higher-ups were trying to think of a way to destroy it? I don’t know if you’re aware, but after the Hindenburg blew up the Germans refused to let anyone help clean up the debris. They sent over teams themselves to haul the zeppelin’s skeleton back to Germany. That could have been cover to find Bowie’s safe in the wreckage, only he was a step ahead of them and heaved it over the side above Waretown, New Jersey.”
“I think it was the Janissaries,” Cali offered. “I think they realized they’d made a mistake letting Bowie go in Brazzaville, somehow learned he was going to be on the Hindenburg, and had someone in the United States in place to take it out.”
Ira scratched his bald head. “I might have a third candidate, one that might squirrel all your theories.” He reached into the middle drawer of his desk and placed an item on the blotter.
Mercer recognized it at once. “That’s the bullet the old woman gave me in Africa.”
“I sent it to the FBI lab at Quantico,” Ira said. “This, my friend, isn’t a German round but a 7.65-by-25 shell casing from either a pistol or a PP Sh submachine gun, which if you aren’t aware, was the standard automatic weapon for the Soviet Army during World War Two.”
“The Soviets?” Mercer and Cali said as one and then fell silent.
Mercer hadn’t expected this at all. He was certain that it was the Germans who were after Bowie. As far as he knew the Soviet Union didn’t even have a nuclear program until spies infiltrated the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, so why would they want plutonium five years earlier? He was about to mention this when Cali spoke up.
“It makes perfect sense,” she said. “We know the Soviet Union had spies at Los Alamos, which is how they got the plans for the bomb. Stalin knew more about it than Truman when they met at Potsdam and the President mentioned we had a weapon that would end the war. What has never made sense to me and a lot of people who studied the history was how the Soviets were able to create their own bomb so soon after the Japanese surrender. Rather than the decades we expected to have nuclear dominance, we lost it in just four years.
“The entire western third of Russia had been devastated by the war,” Cali went on. “Whole cities were destroyed and millions of people were left homeless. The Soviets didn’t receive any of the aid we gave to Europe to rebuild. In fact they had to spend money to shore up their holdings in Eastern Europe. I know Stalin was a ruthless tyrant, but the economics don’t pan out. They didn’t have the resources to keep their people from starving while trying to rebuild their own country, occupy Eastern Europe all the way to Germany, and spend a hundred billion dollars building their own bomb. Even with the plans provided by Stalin’s spies, it takes a tremendous amou
nt of sophistication and resources to refine fissionable materials.” She caught Mercer’s eye. “But what if he already had those materials? If the Russians had some of the ore, it would dramatically reduce the amount of time and the cost it would take to build an atomic bomb. They could easily do it in four years and still do everything else I mentioned.”
“Makes sense,” Ira said thoughtfully. “I’ve got a lot of contacts in Russia, and since the collapse they’ve been pretty forthcoming with information from the bad old days. I’ll ask around to see if what you surmise is true.” He looked at Mercer. “What about you? Where do you want to take this?”
“Cali spoke with her supervisor at NEST. We’ve got them tracing the disappearance of the Wetherby.”
“How do you know she disappeared?”
“Simple. Nowhere in the history books does it say Enrico Fermi experimented with plutonium ore in the 1930s, so he must have never received the samples, ergo the Wetherby vanished. Also I think someone should take a look at that stele Cali and I saw in Africa. There could be clues on it about how much ore Alexander’s people mined.”
“Is that important?” Ira asked. “I mean come on, we’re talking ancient history.”
“If we’re only right about Alexander possessing a radiological bomb or dispersal device, then I’d agree, but the Janissaries who nabbed Cali last night act as though the alembic is lying around for someone to find.”
“You told me over dinner that you think that part of the Central African Republic is still pretty hot. I don’t want to send a team in there unless you’re sure it’s important.”
Mercer silently cursed Ira, though he didn’t believe his old friend was deliberately putting the responsibility for a potentially dangerous operation on his shoulders. He was just being cautious. But Mercer knew the ultimate responsibility would fall on him if something went wrong. Like Serena’s death and the others at the casino. Like Tisa’s and dozens more—he felt the weight of it all pressing down on him. It would be so easy to just tell Ira to forget it, that he didn’t need to send a Special Forces team into the middle of a war zone. He could crawl out from under a little of his guilt. But Mercer also knew it would be wrong.
It didn’t matter if the stele turned out to be nothing more than a marker saying the equivalent of “Kilroy was here.” He had to know, no matter the cost.
“Yeah,” Mercer finally said. “It’s important.”
“Consider it done,” Ira replied with finality.
Buffalo,
New York
Mercer opened the door of the Cessna Citation executive jet as soon as the wheels stopped rolling. Mist that was almost rain swept Buffalo Niagara International Airport, making the runway lights blur into the distance. Dawn was just a ruddy promise hunkered low against the eastern horizon. He grabbed his leather hand grip but didn’t bother pulling up the hood of his North Face rain jacket. As soon as he stepped from the aircraft, water glittered like jewels in his thick hair.
“Dr. Mercer?” a man’s voice called from the rear of the airport’s general aviation gate.
“I’m Mercer,” he replied and strode across the tarmac, paying scant attention to the multimillion-dollar jets parked all around. A throaty roar swallowed the man’s next sentence as a Boeing 737 hauled itself into the dark sky. “What was that?” Mercer asked as he reached the protection of a glass enclosure that led into the building.
“I said you have a car waiting to take you to the docks.”
“Thank you,” Mercer said and followed the executive jet service employee through the lounge. They walked across the quiet airport and eventually reached an exit. A black Town Car idled at the curb, its driver waiting expectantly in the front seat.
Mercer didn’t wait for the chauffeur to open the door. He did it himself, then tossed his bag into the back and swung himself into the front seat. “Morning,” he said in greeting to the startled driver. “I’m not important enough for the full chauffeur treatment so I’ll ride up front with you.”
“Guy gets off a private jet and says he’s not important, don’t know his place in the world, but it makes me no never mind.” The driver eased the big Lincoln into gear and headed out of the airport complex. Soon they were on Route 33 headed west toward an area of industrial warehouses along the Niagara River.
As the car eased between two metal buildings and onto the dock, Mercer saw a tight cluster of people huddled around the gangway of a large flat-bottomed barge. Above them a street lamp cast their faces in heavy relief. Sitting atop the barge was a crane with a modified smooth silhouette. It reminded him of the low-slung turret of a modern battle tank rather than a lifting derrick. It was tied to a small tug with side-mounted exhaust, so the vessel was no more than ten feet high from the waterline to the top of its radar dish.
Mercer recognized Cali Stowe standing with the people. She stood several inches taller than all of them. When he got out of the car, she looked over and waved. She wore a dark windbreaker and her hair was covered in a baseball cap. Her jeans were just tight enough to outline the lean shape of her legs.
Mercer grabbed his bag, thanked the driver, and approached the group. The drizzle had stopped and dawn was fast approaching. The air remained crisp with the smell of Lake Erie.
“Welcome to Buffalo,” Cali greeted.
It was the first time they’d seen each other since the meeting with Ira Lasko four days earlier, and he had to resist the urge to kiss her cheek. Had they been alone he would have done it.
“Let me introduce you around,” she said. “Philip Mercer, this is my boss, Cliff Roberts.” Because Cali and Ira had a low opinion of the director of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, Mercer knew he wouldn’t like him either. Roberts had mouse brown hair and indistinct features, except for a pursed mouth that looked as if he’d just swallowed something sour. His stance made certain that his trench coat was open enough for everyone to see it was a Burberry. He didn’t meet Mercer’s eyes when they shook hands, and his grip was limp.
“Pleasure to have you with us,” Roberts said with little warmth. It was obvious he resented Mercer’s presence in what was to be NEST’s highest profile operation when or if word got out about what they were doing.
“I’m glad to be here,” Mercer replied neutrally. “When Admiral Lasko wanted an observer I happened to be available.”
Roberts said nothing so Cali piped in, “And these two characters are Jesse Williams and Stanley Slaughbaugh. They’re part of my regular NEST team. Stan’s a Ph.D. from Stanford and Jesse joined our outfit after babysitting nukes for the air force.”
Mercer shook their hands. He eyed Jesse Williams. “Didn’t you play for the Air Force Academy?”
“Good memory, man.” Williams grinned. “That was fifteen years ago. Missed the Heisman by five votes.”
“I have a friend who, well, he’s a bookie.” Mercer was talking about Tiny. “He said the most money he ever won on a game was when you upset Michigan State in the Cotton Bowl.”
Williams’s smile faded just a tick. “Same game I blew my ACL and any chance of a pro career.”
“And finally this is Lieutenant Commander Ruth Bishop from the Coast Guard,” Cali said, not wanting to hear another insufferable football conversation. “Ruth’s here to ensure we follow the Coasty’s regulations concerning the salvage and she’ll act as liaison with her Canadian counterpart since the Wetherby is pretty close to the border.”
She was a short woman in a Coast Guard utility uniform. Her hair was streaked with silver and there were lines around her mouth and bright blue eyes. Mercer had the impression they were laughter rather than frown lines. She glanced at Cali before saying hello, which made Mercer think the two women had talked about him prior to his arrival.
“Just think of me as your den mother,” she said with a toothy smile that made her glow with warmth. “When you’re not sure about something ask me for permission before you do it.”
“So when I have to pee-pee?”
H
er smile deepened. “Ask me and I’ll give you a hall pass. Just don’t make on the Canadians. They’re touchy about that.”
Mercer laughed. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Ruth is also a bit of the local expert on the Wetherby,” Cali added. “She’s made four dives down to her over the years.”
“Not for a few years now,” Lieutenant Commander Bishop admitted.
“What’s her condition?” Mercer asked. Before Ruth could answer, he asked another question. “First of all, why don’t you tell me what happened to her and what kind of ship she was.”
“Okay. First, the Wetherby was a tramp steamer, what’s called a stick ship. She was only two hundred twenty feet long and thirty feet at the beam. She was coal fired, had a single stack, and from what I’ve been able to learn hadn’t seen a moment’s maintenance after she put to sea.” Bishop corrected herself. “That’s not entirely true. She served admirably during World War One on convoy duty but after that she was a derelict waiting to happen.”
“So what happened when she reached Buffalo?”
“The Wetherby put in here on the night of August 9, 1937, where she was picking up some machine parts headed for Cleveland. She was then supposed to go on to Detroit, Milwaukee, and finally Chicago, where Cali said the cargo you are interested in was destined.”
“That’s right.”
“Early morning August 10 she unloaded some fuel oil barrels she’d picked up in Montreal that were supposed to have come down the St. Lawrence on another ship. During the transfer a fire started in the hold. Since no one physically inspected the wreck because she sank, investigators had to go along with eyewitnesses who claimed she was struck by lightning.”
“There’s a problem with their story.” It was a statement more than a question.
“It was raining that day but no one other than the crew in the hold recall any lightning in the area. It’s possible a static charge built up and its discharge ignited one of the fuel barrels, but I’m putting my money on either a longshoreman or a member of the crew smoking in the hold. A dropped match in some spilled bunker fuel and voilà.” She made the motion of an explosion with her hands.