Category 7

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  Hundreds of miles to the west of the storm, along America’s luxuriant southeastern coast, the night sky was clear and bright with stars. Wanderers on the moonlit beaches of the many lush, verdant barrier islands reveled in the freshening breeze, a welcome respite from the oppressive heat of the day. By morning, those beachcombers knew, the same stretches of sand would reveal small wonders from the sea, pushed landward by the silvered surf that now pounded the shore perhaps a little harder than it had earlier in the day.

  Any thoughts of menace from the growing storm far out to sea were casual; right now the storm had no bearing on their lives and thus garnered little attention other than the idle speculation of vacationers enjoying the subtropical ennui for which they had planned and paid.

  CHAPTER 14

  Friday, July 13, 2:00 A.M., Greenwich, Connecticut

  Richard turned his head away from the softly glowing numerals on his bedside clock and resumed staring at the ceiling.

  Two in the morning.

  The rain had begun softly but had gotten heavier as he’d driven Kate back to the train station. The silence between them had been nearly as dense as the air. The ease and good humor that always marked their monthly dinners had been strained by the topic of their conversation. Even now, many hours later, he couldn’t shake the shadow that her determination had cast over him.

  Tenacity had never been a characteristic he associated with Kate, which made her stubborn refusal to drop this line of questioning all the more curious. He had a feeling she’d latched onto these storms to avoid a few of the human variety that were bubbling up in her parents’ small apartment in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Gerritsen Beach. And that meant she wasn’t likely to give up on her pursuit quickly or easily. When one was confronted with an unpleasant reality, speculation was always a comfortable refuge.

  He let out a heavy sigh. Kate was smart. It hadn’t taken her long to come to some intriguing conclusions, but she couldn’t see that those very conclusions could become a flash point because, for all her brains and Brooklyn bluster, Kate was naïve. She wouldn’t rest until she had a theory she could both verify and be comfortable with. Unfortunately, there were a lot of people out there who didn’t care much about that. The conspiracy nut bars in cyberland would seize upon those perhaps-valid questions and turn them into weapons that could fatally damage Kate’s career and credibility. If there was a whiff of scandal that could in any way point to the man who signed her paychecks, Carter Thompson, Kate would lose her job. Carter Thompson was not a man to suffer fools or to suffer being made to look foolish.

  Pushing back the covers, Richard got out of bed and walked barefoot through the dark house to the small screened porch off the dining room. Or what used to be the dining room. Now the table served as a cluttered way station for things in transit to other parts of the house.

  He didn’t bother to close the door behind him. The fresh air would cool off the house.

  After he’d dropped Kate at the station, he’d gotten online and looked up the storms she was obsessing over just to verify what she’d told him about all the parameters being normal. He had to admit that, based on what he’d discovered, she was right. The storms were anything but ordinary, and that left him even more unsettled. Not that he’d ever admit it to Kate, but ever since that debacle in Barbados, he’d been wondering about it himself.

  It.

  He took a deep breath, not wanting to think about it.

  On a global scale, the ferocity of storms in general had increased in the last few years, seeding the already-fertile soil of weather watchers’ minds with theories old and new. In little more than an hour on the Web tonight, he’d read white papers that flatly stated the increased intensity was due to global warming, others insisting it was due to unusually strong solar flare activity, and even one that ascribed it to geomagnetic disturbances resulting from minute gravitational fluctuations in outer space. And those were just a few of the hypotheses floating around the scientific establishment.

  When he took into account theories espoused by the borderline whack-jobs of the science world, the list became exponentially longer and more ludicrous. There were dire warnings about bombardments of electromagnetic pulses from ultrasecret Soviet-era satellites still in orbit and about the U.S. military bouncing high-frequency waves off the ionosphere in an effort to effect wide-scale mind control. And then there were the dubious sources that insisted that shadowy, acronym-heavy military/intelligence/industrial organizations were getting involved. The most widely espoused theories described special radio frequencies used to create artificial stationary pressure ridges in the jet stream to provoke floods, droughts, and general economic devastation or, conversely, excellent weather for fun and profit. The calm weather in the early part of the summer, and its sudden cessation a week or so ago, had helped fuel that discussion beyond all bounds of reason.

  He rubbed his eyes. Many—most—of the theories were closely held and passionately defended, and not just by the wing nuts of the world, either. Not long ago, two prominent scientists in the meteorology community had been invited to a major industry conference to debate the cause of the increasing intensities of the Atlantic hurricanes over the last few years. What was supposed to be a frank and candid discussion of the effects of human-influenced global warming versus a natural cyclical trend in the earth’s climatology had been preemptively canceled amid an unexpected and heated escalation of opinions. And that was involving cool-headed, real-world scientists.

  Richard stared across the small moonlight-streaked patch of wet lawn to the thick cluster of trees at the edge of his property as two disturbing words kept reverberating in his mind like the endless rhythm of a bad dance band. Carter Thompson.

  When they’d met forty years ago as handpicked recruits for a CIA weather-research program, Richard had known right away that Carter had the skill and the drive to accomplish anything he set out to do. He’d had a tenacity unlike anything Richard had ever encountered before, and he’d been a relentless team leader, taking every success, every failure, personally. A man with a deep, passionate, almost mystical respect for Nature, Carter had embraced the program’s goals so completely that the rest of the team had been a little in awe of him.

  Eleven of the best meteorological minds the government could buy had worked in that stuffy, cramped, windowless computer lab in Langley to create the ultimate weapon—one that was untraceable, unstoppable, and potentially less lethal but exponentially more effective than conventional or even the newly minted “unconventional” weaponry being developed at the time. They’d been working on harnessing the force and fury of weather.

  Their mission was to take the relatively small amount of existing weather research and twist, stretch, and reshape it to create the ultimate Cold War “force multiplier.” Other researchers working under the same umbrella program were building on the cloud-seeding and other rain-making experiments that had been under way for more than a decade, but Carter’s team had been told to create weather. To build storms and escalate them. To learn not just how to track them, but how to steer them. And how to stop them.

  With the specter of Russian success breathing hot against their necks, they’d had the freedom to follow every crackpot theory, every off-the-wall idea, and they’d done so at an exhausting pace, sometimes forgetting to eat or sleep or go home as they worked to turn hypotheses into refined computer models and to push those computer models to the field trial stage.

  They’d been so close to achieving their goal.

  Operation POPEYE had been dumping rain on the Ho Chi Minh Trail for the better part of a few years when the public, already fed up with the war, had learned of its existence due to a leak. The pressure on the Pentagon to answer questions on weather research was getting intense, as was the pressure on Carter’s team to achieve a positive result. They had been doing calculations using every piece of data available to them to perfect a recipe for a typhoon, and Carter had persuaded the military that directing targeted se
quential bursts of high-intensity lasers at both an embryonic storm cell and the surface of the ocean surrounding it would produce the heat needed to speed the convection cycle and grow a storm. With almost evangelical zeal, Carter had assured the Agency higher-ups that his team could create a cyclonic storm with a size and intensity that could be modified at will. Finally, in the late summer of 1971, they’d received orders to take their ideas out of the lab and into the Pacific Basin.

  They hadn’t needed to be told twice. To conduct what they didn’t realize would be their only field trial, he and Carter had boarded a military transport in Maryland. Seventy-two hours later, after hopscotching across the country and the ocean, they’d arrived at a U.S. air base, the name of which they never learned. After a harried day or two getting details organized and crews briefed, Richard and the surface-mounted monitoring equipment had been flown in a thundering open Huey to a ship waiting to take them to their target zone in the South China Sea. Ground Zero was nothing more than a specific coordinate chosen for its atmospheric predictability and the likelihood that it would provide the conditions they would need. It was also far enough into the open ocean that nobody would see anything—but if by chance someone did, they wouldn’t understand it.

  He’d been a young, skinny CIA scientist with no combat training and no sea legs. He hadn’t had much more than his Southern ways to keep him going on that ship, surrounded as he was by a mixture of silent Agency observers and an annoyed, twitchy pod of high-ranking, beribboned, battle-hardened military officers representing all the branches. Everyone was waiting on deck impatiently for Carter to appear over the horizon in the specially modified C-130 Hercules cargo plane that carried the enormous machinery that generated the laser, which, in those days, was a technology few people inside or outside the military had worked with or understood.

  It had been as near to perfect a day to run the test as they could have wanted. The majority of the clouds were few and high, wispy mackerel cirrus that wouldn’t interfere with anything; the rest were the mid-layer cumulus, the puffy cotton-ball clouds that every schoolchild learns to draw. They were the typical, ordinary clouds that formed every day over the ocean as the result of a tropical sun beating onto warm water. They drifted through relatively stable air all day long and dissipated overnight, only to reestablish themselves the next day.

  Until he and Carter had gotten hold of them.

  When the Herc bearing Carter and the laser finally appeared on the horizon, Richard had suggested that the observers might want to watch from the bridge. Stony, silent macho glares had greeted his words, but he quickly put the uniformed men out of his mind as he readied his equipment. Brief, terse radio exchanges identified the targeted cloud cluster, and he’d watched the plane bank slowly as it rose higher into the painfully blue sky, heading for the strike zone.

  A single, searing pulse of heat, measurable in seconds, burst from the pod hanging below the belly of the aircraft, scorching the air and sending the benign, picturesque clouds into a billowing, explosive frenzy that drew gasps from the men behind him. Lightning and thunder shattered the air as churning, chaotic winds pelted them with hot, fat raindrops that stung like hordes of angry bees, wilting the knife-sharp creases of a dozen starched uniforms.

  Twenty minutes later, the storm was over, the sky was clear, the plane carrying Carter was a speck on the horizon, and most of the officials around Richard had regained the power of speech.

  He and Carter stayed in the region for a month, playing fast and loose with Nature as if they were a pair of playboy gods, in the process creating the most active typhoon season ever recorded in the Pacific—a record that had never been broken. By the time they headed stateside a month later, Southeast Asia had been battered by seven typhoons inside of five weeks, including two that had achieved sustained winds of 140 miles an hour.

  By all accounts, their work had been more than a success. It had been masterful, and the buzz had made them nearly drunk with victory.

  Then, in what had to be one of the cruelest twists of fate, the day their last storm dissipated over China after having smashed into Taiwan with deadly force, Senator Claiborne Pell, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans and International Environment and under relentless pressure from the public, began demanding the Pentagon surrender information about weather manipulation programs.

  By the time he and Carter had returned to their desks, they were no longer heroes except to their fellow team members. The entire program had been disbanded.

  Enraged beyond the boundaries of prudence or foresight, Carter protested at Langley and later during secret hearings on Capitol Hill. He forcefully explained that the Soviets were masters at copying what the U.S. achieved and the successes enjoyed by his team would eventually be reproduced behind the Iron Curtain. If the U.S. didn’t control the weather, the Soviets would, he’d argued, and whoever controlled the weather would truly rule the world.

  The more passionate Carter’s arguments became the more they met with tight-lipped, dispassionate rejection from the higher-ups at the Agency and with cold, unsympathetic smiles from members of Congress, including the man who now held sway in the Oval Office, Winslow Benson.

  Richard and the rest of the team had left Carter to his anger, eventually accepting that it would have been impossible, not to mention dangerous, for the Congress to ignore the public outrage. The furor that erupted when the fearless Washington Post reporter Jack Anderson broke the news about Operation POPEYE in March of that year had not died down as insiders had hoped it would; however grudgingly, Congress had to be seen to be responsive.

  Weather control, Carter’s team was told, was too much of a hot-button issue and conjured up too many science-fiction scenarios. Even secret weather research funding was duly cut in favor of research advancing nuclear technologies, which few voters understood but most accepted because of nuclear power’s perceived connection to the triumphant horrors of the bombing of Japan.

  The team had been unceremoniously dispersed, with most of them asked to spend six months in their “cover” roles at the infant National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration before heading back into civilian life. Nearly all had slipped quietly back into their lives as soon as they could. Like Richard, many went into academia. None had become researchers, barred as they were from working on anything related to what they’d done at the Agency.

  Carter alone had lingered at NOAA for more than a year, finding and, when necessary, creating battles with the funding subcommittees. Richard knew the impetus behind those debates hadn’t been policy or even principle; it had been vanity. The smirking junior senator from New York, Winslow Benson, who had been a member of the body that eliminated their program, was also a member of the committee that funded NOAA. None of their group had liked Senator Benson with his patronizing manner and William F. Buckley-esque intonation; however, most of them had tried to ignore his condescension.

  Not Carter.

  Carter had taken the senator’s blithe dismissal of his arguments as a personal affront. Years later, when the senator’s quiet allegiance to the emergent nuclear power industry became known after the Three Mile Island debacle, Carter reached what Richard considered his tipping point.

  Enraged, Carter had spoken of the accident as would a man speaking of witnessing the rape of his wife. The fury of Carter’s diatribe had been so unsettling that Richard had eased away from further contact with him, but he knew that from that moment forward, Winslow Benson would be to Carter the embodiment of government treachery and environmental perfidy. That the man now sat in the White House had to be gnawing at Carter’s already-bloodied sense of justice.

  A wet nose nudging him in the small of his back brought Richard out of his reverie. As he opened the screen door to let Finn wander in the yard, a grim truth introduced itself in his mind.

  Carter had always had the imagination, skill, and drive to help the team achieve its goals. After the collapse of his scientific career, Carter had put that same ima
gination and energy into creating not one but two highly profitable companies, and his net worth was now measurable in the billions of dollars.

  Which meant for the past decade or more he had had the means and the opportunity to resume their research.

  But was there a motive significant enough to spur Carter to pick up where we left off?

  The unspoken question sent an icy tremor down Richard’s spine. It would be so simple—reassuring actually—to say that mere greed could motivate Carter to engage in something so chilling, but Carter had never been money oriented. Even now, the media continually marveled at how simply he lived considering how wealthy he was. The sickening reality was that Carter’s personality allowed for only two possible motives: power or vengeance. With Winslow Benson contemplating reelection and Carter sitting on billions of available dollars in his beloved Iowa cornfields, either motive—or both—could apply.

  As he opened the door to let Finn in from his quick predawn sniff, Richard looked up at the dark, cloudless sky. Another beautiful day was in the making.

  It sent another cold shiver down his back.

  CHAPTER 15

  Friday, July 13, 8:00 A.M., Financial District, New York City

  Elle,

  I know you’re busy with tons of stuff for Davis Lee, but I was wondering if you might have time to take a look at something for me. I’ve attached a paper that’s been accepted for presentation at a meteorology conference, and before I send it to them in final form for inclusion on the CD-ROM they hand out to attendees, I’d like another pair of eyes on it. It’s not too long and, given your background, I figure you’ll pick up on things like mistakes with grammar and footnotes, etc. When it comes to that, I’m one of those “last year I couldn’t spell meteorologist and now I are one” types.