Jackson just shook his head.
'So they did it?'
'Yes, they did it, but it didn't quite go as planned. They constructed a cannon-like apparatus which emitted pulsed toroidal vortices, capable of projecting a stream of Aether 'smoke rings' at a target. Instead of having to place materials within the test chamber itself, they could now point and shoot out pulses with different velocities - the slowest first and the fastest last - so that they could make the Aether rings coincide at a predetermined range, much like a camera lens only being focussed at a specific focal point. Until the rings collided at the designated target location, they would simply pass through any material in their path leaving it unharmed, only producing a combined resonance effect exactly where they wanted it and defined by the attributes of the vortex beams hitting it.'
Jackson started to shake his head.
'I still don't understand though, if they had managed to get that far, well, such a weapon would be incredible, it would be devastating.'
'Just so, but I didn't say that they had perfected the weapon. Besides, the cannon itself was just a method of transmitting the vortex beams, not a weapon per se and this was explicitly demonstrated in their propulsion tests.'
A broad smile creased Jackson's face.
'Foo Fighters!'
'Exactly so!' nodded Kappel.
'Teleresonance meant that they could create an effect at a distance, but that didn't mean they could just destroy things. A beam could be tuned to specific materials - steel for instance - and they reached the stage where they could target a relatively lightweight metal sphere and cause it to levitate. With the correctly tuned vortices being pumped out, the resonance effect made the frame of the sphere jerk and dance.
'They even managed to send the spheres up into the skies, experimenting with using them as demolition balls and attempting to smash them into allied aircraft but that didn't work out; the spheres had a kind of repulsion effect against other metal objects and instead of smashing through the targets the balls would just start slipping and sliding over the surfaces of the aircraft, skimming the wings and fuselages but not actually making any contact. As reported by allied aircrews, the Foo Fighters could perform incredible acrobatics in mid air and all the operator had to do was keep the ball in the same range as the aircraft, even at twenty thousand feet.'
'What about weaponisation though,' queried Jolene, 'surely that was more significant? I mean, knocking allied planes out of the sky with giant remote controlled ball bearings seems a little pointless if the device could really do all the things that are claimed.'
Kappel put a hand up to stop Jolene.
'Not just claimed, these things were a reality, but you must remember that the project was divided into three heavily compartmented areas of research; energy, propulsion and weapons. Each team worked in isolation and only the Bell scientists themselves understood the full range of effects that were possible, however, advances by one research team did not guarantee or preclude successes by another. In point of fact, the weapons project was actually going just as well as the propulsion research and as Jackson identified, a successful battle test was completed over France when a bomber formation was destroyed by a resonance induced thermal explosion. They aimed a remote controlled rocket plane into the midst of the bombers and then blasted it to cause rapid heating. As the report states, the result was catastrophic.'
'The Komet,' Jackson stated matter of factly, 'although I had it slightly wrong. The plane was not just carrying the weapon; it was the weapon, or at least the seed for a major thermal reaction. I read somewhere that if you could heat up a pin head to the temperature of the sun's core it would vaporise everything for a thousand miles around. I guess that this was much the same principle.'
They all remained silent for while and it was Jolene that broke the spell, shaking her head slowly.
'I'm sorry sir, I just cannot reconcile this with reality. After all, with a weapon like this available they could have launched devastating attacks on allied forces, or levitated steel balls packed with explosives right over the Atlantic to bomb the US. What happened? Did we develop a defence against it? We must have some records available that can tell us something?'
Jackson looked sharply at her and then returned his gaze to the laptop screen.
'I am loathe to admit it sir and although I am convinced by the general concept, I have to agree with Jolene.'
'Well,' Kappel mused, sitting back and resting his interlocked hands across his waist, 'all of these advances were still in the prototype stage. It was one thing to juggle metal spheres in the air but quite another to build a fully functioning and stable flying craft. Creating thermal explosions was all very well but they still hadn't solved the problem of the power input requirements. The weapons and propulsion field tests I mentioned were carried out from the very refinery that the allies were on their way to bomb with easy access to massive power supplies.
'Admittedly, the propulsion tests required a lot less power but even then, they could only lift an object weighing the same as a couple of bags of groceries. Besides which, they hadn't really advanced in the energy research field and could not yet tap into the so-called zero-point that promised all the power they could ever need. They had built some incredible technology, but they were toys in comparison to what they really wanted.'
'I'm sure that they didn't give up though,' Jolene frowned, 'this really was a Wunderwaffe.'
'Indeed it was,' smiled Kappel, 'but levitating a ball full of explosives to drop onto England was considered a very hit and miss affair; it just wasn't worth wasting such a potentially devastating weapon on a field full of cows! After a lot of experimentation, they came to the conclusion that from a propulsion perspective, it was easier to develop a compact form of the Bell but that decision put that project right out of scope in terms of the immediate effect on the course of the war.
'Instead, the energy team concentrated on utilising the transmutation effects to create enriched uranium and the weapons team put their efforts into developing the vortex beam into a directed cannon. The main restriction they then faced was that it had to be based next to a suitable power source but that restricted their range to a few miles of a fixed location.'
'Let me guess,' Jackson said slyly, 'line of sight.'
Jolene gazed at him as the words sunk in and she realised that the beam could not follow the curvature of the Earth's surface.
'Right again,' said Kappel, 'although firing the beam at enemy aircraft was easy enough, they initially envisaged it as a strategic rather than tactical weapon and the beam could only be fired in a straight line, much like a laser. For ground targets and even with the cannon placed on the back of a truck, say ten feet high, they could only get a maximum horizon range of around five miles. To get an effective range of even fifty miles, it would have necessitated placing it on a platform almost two and a half thousand feet high which might have been fine for mountainous regions but was considered as generally impractical. What they needed was a way to bend the flight path of the beam to create a predictable trajectory.'
'A trajectory? You mean like a ballistic trajectory?' Jolene rasped, looking slightly disconcerted. 'Sir, are you saying that they achieved this?'
Kappel pursed his lips before answering.
'They had the theory all drawn up and they'd even came up with a simple but brilliant solution; vorticular turbulence. By inducing small and measured fluctuations in the rotation of the vortex rings that were emitted, they were able to induce a predictably curved beam - a bit like a baseball, when you throw a spin and get a curve-ball. By arcing the beam and creating a ballistic trajectory they could extend the range to almost ten thousand miles, firing it into the air just like long range artillery to land on a target on the other side of the world.'
'Wow,' Jackson gasped before pausing, 'that would have brought cities within the United States well into range, even LA, not to mention Moscow, London, Paris, Rome -'
Jolene narrowed h
er eyes and thought of the consequences.
'That would cover almost half of the Earth's circumference; two or three strategically placed weapons could hold the entire world to ransom.'
Kappel let them both think about the true impact of such a development before he continued. He watched Jolene's brow bunch up as she frowned and Jackson's eyebrows rising as he considered the threat that such a weapon would have posed.
'What was it capable of though?' Jackson interrupted. 'I mean, what could this weapon actually do?'
Kappel snorted and gazed at his ceiling for a moment before responding.
'Imagine the US back in 1945, we were fighting a war that, metaphorically speaking, was on the other side of the world. We lost good brave men fighting the Nazi machine but even so, apart from the losses manifested as thousands of telegrams received by families in every state across the nation we were effectively abstracted from the reality of war on the home front; the bombing, the gunfire in the streets, entire cities reduced to rubble.'
His face loomed in the screen as his tone became solemn.
'Now imagine an Aether vortex beam aimed right across the Atlantic, and targeting New York, a beam striking down to turn every single piece of iron into nothing but rust, buildings collapsing in clouds of dust to piles of mangled wreckage, the panic and terror on our own streets. Alternatively, consider a vortex beam tuned to resonate with water molecules, causing them to instantaneously boil away or freeze solid, consider that the human body is at least sixty per cent water; do you see the potential now?
'The concept was incredible and the practical application was very clear; such a weapon could burn cities to cinders, boil people as they slept in their beds, reduce stone to dust and meld metal into twisted fragments. It could even create atmospheric effects, manipulating the weather to cause violent storms or blizzards lasting for weeks and what still stood after artificially induced hurricane winds could then be buried under a blanket of snow and ice.
'Nothing was inconceivable. It truly represented the doomsday weapon; it even promised to deliver the destruction of the Earth itself and could precipitate volcanic eruptions and earthquakes if turned against the ground beneath our feet.'
Jolene was shaking her head.
'So what happened to it, if they had this as a prototype, even on the drawing boards, what happened?'
Kappel wryly arched an eyebrow.
'Himmler encountered a problem that he really wasn't prepared for.'
They stared at him expectantly.
'Paranoia!'
Chapter XXI
The Winds of Change
Senator Terence Dru replaced the handset of his desk telephone back onto its cradle. He had no fear of interception or eaves-dropping from any intelligence service since the system was all connected to an encryption and transmission hub that kept his conversation and location totally secure. He rested his hand on the receiver as he thought for a moment, the whirls and eddies spinning out from the river of events that had been set to flow now needed some attention. The 'Old Lady' had already swallowed the bird as the rhyme suggested, but there was now a need to bring to fruition one of the most important aspects of the grand plan and the abduction of the Verker girl presented a fortuitous opportunity.
Although the plan had never called for Rey Faber to take the girl, since she was now held securely in one of the Order's safe houses they might as well make use of her. Dru knew that if the US or British security services intervened in Scotland then Rey's team would follow their planned escape route down to the south of England and cross the English Channel to France using previously prepared identities. He had peremptorily instructed Frans to leave the Verker girl in the hands of the brothers and sisters that operated the safe house in Krefeld and to travel to Caen in France immediately to support any European extraction that was necessary for Rey's team.
Frans had grumbled and between his harrumphs and rasps it was obvious that he found the instructions slightly unsettling. He had been a senior Knight Commander - a Tribune - long enough to know when things were not quite as they seemed but his sense of loyalty and respect for the chain of command compelled him to undertake his duty even if he would naturally prepare for the worst case scenario.
The play of events had been set and Senator Dru would soon call the surveillance team that had been placed near the US army base at Wiesbaden to seed the next endeavours; the butterfly's wings would create a hurricane of events that would all be to the benefit of the Sun of the Sleepless.
Chapter XXII
Traffic
A gust of wind blew the discarded wrapper paper detritus from a fast food meal along the pavement as Pieter van Riel stepped out from the police headquarters in the south-eastern city of Venlo in The Netherlands. He had been following the only lead that he had, making use of his contacts within the nation's police force to try and track the Volkswagen and the Renault van that Getrude Verker had almost certainly been bundled into near the beach back in The Hague.
He took a deep breath and knew that he was still on track, a vehicle license plate recognition system had recently been trialled in the area and even without a complete number sequence for the van he had been given a definite lead; a match for the vehicle had been identified as travelling along the A67 route heading toward the German border. Admittedly, the VW trail had gone cold but he was primarily interested in the Verker girl in the back of the Renault and he was now another step closer to finding her.
Pieter walked back to his car and climbed in, a chill causing him to shudder as his body reacted to the cold stagnant air that had soon replaced the previously snug interior accumulated after his drive a couple of hours ago. The windows began misting and he switched on the ignition to start the car, hoping that the heat would soon start to flow from the vents to warm him up.
With the engine idling quietly, he settled himself in and reached across to the passenger seat to pick up the large road atlas lying on the passenger seat next to him. Impatiently flicking through the pages to find the map area he had been looking, he hastily opened the atlas at the page showing Venlo and the border crossing and started scanning the landscape. He soon rationalised a couple of routes into Germany; the assailants were probably heading along the A40 towards Moers as he had discounted the possibility of them taking an alternative route aiming for Mönchengladbach since they would almost certainly have turned off prior to passing Venlo. No, he was sure that they were heading east and it just remained to identify the next suitable check-point to determine whether they had passed through or turned off prior to reaching it.
He soon concluded that a place called Tönisberg further along the A40 provided the best opportunity to track the movements of the van, a significant intersection was located there which Pieter guessed would have video surveillance. It was clear that he needed to drive to the nearby large town of Oberhausen and speak with the German traffic police in the area but before that, he needed to make a phone call and hope that he could persuade one of his old German colleagues that he was not on a wild goose chase.
Pieter flopped the road atlas back onto the passenger seat and slotted the car into gear, revving the engine and ready for the next fifty-five kilometres of his journey.
Pieter strode along a corridor within the police centre in Oberhausen, a plastic visitor's identity card swinging from the lapel of his warm winter jacket. It was considerably hotter inside than out but even so, he had only just unzipped his jacket to cool himself down as he realised that he was starting to sweat as he trailed behind the young trainee officer leading him to the traffic section.
Just an hour before, an urgently relayed call from Pieter to Polizeihauptkommissar Hans Kruger had enabled the visit to be hastily arranged. The German police detective had been an international colleague of Pieter's for some years, since they first met during a major international drugs smuggling investigation almost ten years ago when they had both been junior officers working on different aspects of the same case. The operation
had involved the forces from England, The Netherlands and Germany and had been concerned with an English gang operating in the area of Merseyside which had been importing large quantities of heroin into Europe and the UK.
A drugs haul worth over one million pounds had been recovered and several arrests were made but the supply from the opium poppy fields of Afghanistan's Northern provinces had continued unabated in spite of the Taliban's ban on poppy cultivation introduced during the millennium year.
Stealing a glance at his watch, Pieter could only hope that Gertrude Verker was alive and relatively comfortable, in spite of the circumstances of her abduction. His professional intuition suggested that whoever had taken her had not intended to harm her, at least not immediately - they could have killed her at her apartment - however, he was keen to move his private investigation along as quickly as possible. The junior officer ahead of him arrived at a door and rapped twice before marching in and making a quick introduction to a young guy seated at a terminal.
Although introduced as Detlef, the young man quickly clarified that he preferred to be called Steve, causing the escort officer in the door to grunt and raise his eyebrows before swiftly departing. Pieter nodded in acknowledgement as the young guy smiled and he was soon seated next to him, both of them switching to English in order to converse.
'Hi,' Pieter said, 'so I think that you can help me to track a vehicle that was travelling from Venlo into Germany?'
Steve smiled warmly.
'I can and with this system I can track a car right across Germany!'
A wide grin creased Pieter's face.
'Then let us get started!'
It had taken just a matter of minutes to determine that the Renault van had not only passed through the Tönisberg intersection, but had continued on to the next intersection and turned onto the A57 to head due south. Pieter was slightly dismayed that a further range of possible destinations was now presented, but Steve's enthusiasm seemed to spike at the opportunity to show off his skills at tracing a vehicle.
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