For the past three hours, the entire facility had been troubleshooting every piece of equipment and electronics. Next month, his team was scheduled for a joint experiment with CERN, a Swiss facility.
If that had to be canceled—
He stood up to stretch his aching back and crossed to his window. He loved the light at this early hour, perfect for photography, a hobby of his. Adorning his walls were pictures he’d taken of Mount Fuji at sunrise, reflecting in Lake Kawaguchi, another of the Nara Pagoda set against a backdrop of fiery maples, or his favorite, a picture of Shiraito Falls in winter, with skeletal ice-encased trees scattering the morning light into rainbows.
Beyond his window was the less picturesque landscape of the observatory campus, but a small water garden lay below, alongside a raked and swept Zen garden, swirling around a tall craggy rock. He often felt like that rock, standing alone, bent-backed, swirled by life around him.
Interrupting his reverie, the door swung open behind him. A leggy blond colleague, Dr. Janice Cooper, a postgraduate student from Stanford, strode swiftly into the room. She was thirty years younger than Jun, as thin as Jun was round. She always smelled of coconut oil and carried herself as if she were about to bound away, too full of California sunshine to sit still.
Sometimes her simple presence exhausted him.
“Dr. Yoshida!” she said, out of breath as if she had been running. “I just heard from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada and from the IceCube facility in Antarctica. They’ve all recorded massive spikes of neutrinos at the same moment in time as we did.”
Clearly she wanted to say more, but Jun held up a hand, needing a moment to think, to let out a sigh of relief. So the data wasn’t a glitch. That solved one mystery—but on its tail rode another more disturbing question: What then was the source for such a colossal blast of neutrinos? The birth of a supernova deep in space? A massive solar flare?
As if reading his mind, Dr. Cooper spoke again. “Riku asked if you’d join him down below. He believes he knows a way to pinpoint the source of the neutrino surge. He was still working on that when I left.”
Jun didn’t have time for the eccentricities of Dr. Riku Tanaka. With clear proof that the spike in neutrinos was not the result of a fault in their systems, he felt the mystery could wait a few hours. He’d been up all night, and at sixty-three years of age, he was no young man.
“He was insistent,” Dr. Cooper pressed. “Said it was important.”
“Everything’s important with Dr. Tanaka,” he mumbled under his breath, not bothering to hide his disdain.
Still, a bit of excitement entered Dr. Cooper’s voice. “Riku believes the neutrinos might be geoneutrinos.”
He looked sharply at her. “That’s impossible.”
Most neutrinos came from the background radiation of the universe: from solar flares, from dying stars, from collapsing galaxies. But some neutrinos—called geoneutrinos—originated from the earth itself: from decaying isotopes in the ground, from cosmic rays striking the upper atmosphere, even from the explosion of atomic bombs.
“That’s what Riku believes,” she insisted.
“Nonsense. It would take the equivalent of a hundred hydrogen bombs to generate a neutrino blast of this magnitude.”
Jun crossed toward the door, moving too suddenly. Pain jolted up his right leg, a flare of sciatica.
Maybe I’d better get down there.
The desire came not so much from a need to find out if Dr. Tanaka was right, but from a wish to prove that the young physicist was wrong. It would be a rare failing, one Jun didn’t want to miss.
Remaining behind to finish her own work, Dr. Cooper held the door for him. He did his best to hide his hobble as he marched out the door and headed for the elevator that descended from the topside offices to the subterranean labs. The elevator shaft was new. Prior to its construction, the only access to the mountain’s heart was via a truck tunnel or mine train. While this approach was swifter, it was also unnerving.
The cage dropped like a falling boulder, lifting his stomach into his throat. Plagued by claustrophobia, he was all too aware of the meters of rock rising over his head. When at last he reached the bottom of the shaft, the doors opened into the main control room for the detector. Divided into cubicles and offices, it looked like any laboratory on the surface.
But Jun wasn’t fooled.
As he stepped out of the elevator, he kept his back hunched, sensing the weight of Mount Ikenoyama above him. He found the shift-duty physicist standing beside a wall-mounted LED monitor near the back of the main hall.
Dr. Riku Tanaka was barely into his twenties, hardly over five feet in height. The wunderkind of physics held dual doctorates and was here working on his third.
At the moment the young man stood stiffly, hands behind his back, staring at a spinning map of the globe. Trails of data flowed in columns down the left half of the screen.
Tanaka held his head cocked, as if listening intently to some sound only he could hear, whispers that perhaps held the answers to the universe’s secrets.
“The results are intriguing,” he said, not even turning, perhaps catching Jun’s reflection in one of the dark monitors to the side.
Jun frowned at the lack of simple courtesy. No bow of greeting, no acknowledgment of the hardship of his coming down here. It was said the young man suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism. But Jun personally believed his colleague was simply rude and used such a diagnosis as an excuse.
Jun joined him at the monitor and treated him as brusquely. “What results?”
“I’ve been gathering data from neutrino labs around the world. From the Russians at Lake Baikal, from the Americans at Los Alamos, from the Brits at Sudbury Observatory.”
“I’ve heard,” Jun said. “They all recorded the spike in neutrinos.”
“I had those other labs send me their data.” Tanaka nodded to the scrolling columns. “Neutrinos travel in a straight line from the source of their creation. Neither gravity nor magnetic fields deflect their path.”
Jun bristled. He didn’t need to be lectured on such fundamentals.
Tanaka seemed unaware of the affront and continued: “So it seemed a simple matter to use that data from various points around the globe and triangulate the primary source of the blast.”
Jun blinked in surprise. It was such a simple solution. His face flushed. As director here, he should have thought of that himself.
“I’ve run the program four times, refining the search parameters with each pass. The source definitely appears to be terrestrial.”
Tanaka tapped at a keyboard below the monitor. On the screen, a narrowing set of crosshairs fixed to the globe. First, encompassing the Western Hemisphere, then North America, then the western half of the United States. With a final few taps, the crosshairs sharpened and the global image zoomed into a section of the Rocky Mountains.
“Here is the source.”
Jun read the territory highlighted on the screen.
Utah.
“How could that be?” he choked out, finding it hard to fathom these impossible results. He remembered his earlier words with Dr. Cooper, how it would take a hundred hydrogen bombs to generate a neutrino blast of this magnitude.
At his side, Tanaka shrugged, his manner insufferably calm. Jun restrained a desire to slap the man, to get a reaction out of him. Instead, he stared at the screen, at the topography of the mountains, with a single question foremost in his mind.
What the hell is going on out there?
Chapter 7
May 30, 3:52 P.M.
Utah Wilderness
Hank leaned low over the mare’s withers, avoiding low-hanging branches as the horse raced downhill through a forest of Douglas firs, western spruce, and lodgepole pines. Still, he got battered and scraped. Behind him, clutching tightly around his waist, Kai fared no better.
He heard her sudden cries of pain, felt her bounce high out of the saddle they shared, b
ut mostly he sensed her terror, her fingers digging into his shirt, her breath ragged.
Hank gave Mariah free rein, trusting her footing and eye for the terrain. He corrected her only with sudden tugs on the lead to keep her path within the shelter of the forest. His dog, Kawtch, kept up with them, racing low to the ground, taking a more direct path through the trees.
Behind them, the military helicopter gave chase, thundering above the treetops. The woodland canopy offered some protection, but Hank was growing more certain that the hunters were tracking them by body heat, using infrared.
Off to the left, a spate of gunfire shredded needles and branches from a spruce tree. Splinters stung his exposed cheek. The hunters’ aim was getting better. As the roar of the chain guns died away, a sharp cry burst forth behind him.
“Professor!” Kai called out. She risked freeing an arm and pointed.
Ahead, a meadow cut across their path, bright with sunshine. It was wide and grassy, dotted by a few scraggly junipers and a handful of granite outcroppings. The forest continued beyond the meadow, but how to reach it? Out in the open, they’d be picked off easily.
As if sensing his worry, Mariah began to slow.
Someone else also noted their dire situation. A fresh rattle of gunfire tore into the forest behind them.
They’re trying to drive us out of the forest.
With no choice but to obey, Hank spurred Mariah into a full gallop, faster than was safe in the dense woods. He whistled for Kawtch to keep at his side as they burst into the sunshine. Free of the forest, Hank aimed for the closest rocky outcropping. Gunfire pursued them, ripping twin lines through the grass as both of the chopper’s guns let loose.
Hank ripped Mariah around the outcropping as if it were a barrel in a rodeo race. The mare cut sharply, hooves digging deep into the loose soil and grass. Hank leaned to keep balance, but he felt Kai’s arms slip, caught by surprise by the sudden turn.
“Hold tight!” he hollered.
But she was not the only one who was surprised by the maneuver.
Rounds sparked off the stone that shielded them—then the chopper shot past overhead, missing its target. It spun, banking around, pivoting to come at them again.
Hank had not slowed Mariah. He aimed straight for the diving helicopter. As it swung to face them, he tugged his pistol from his holster. It was a Ruger Blackhawk, powerful enough to deal with the occasional wild bear. He didn’t know if it was an act of war for a Native American to fire upon a National Guard chopper, but he had not started this fight. Plus his goal was not to kill, only to distract.
He pulled the trigger over and over again as he raced head-on toward the helicopter, emptying the clip. He saw no reason to be reserved. A few rounds even found their target, cracking off the windshield.
The attack caught the hunters off guard.
The chopper bobbled, a spate of return fire cut off abruptly, aborted as the vehicle jostled the gunmen. Hank used his heels to urge Mariah onward, ducking straight under the belly of the helicopter. It was so low now that Hank could have reached up and brushed his hand along the landing skids.
He spotted one of the gunmen hanging out an open hatch overhead, dressed all in commando black. They locked eyes, then Mariah cleared the helicopter. With the thunder of the engines and pound of the rotor wash, the mare needed no further urging.
Mariah shot for the woods again, diving back into the shadows.
Kawtch hit the forest’s edge a few yards to the left.
The chopper’s engines whined into a banshee’s cry as it climbed again and spun after them.
This cat-and-mouse game could not last forever. They’d been lucky so far, but farther down the mountainside, the alpine forests would dwindle to a smattering of oaks and open fields. The hunters must have known the same. The helicopter sped after them. Their pursuers would not be surprised again.
Plus Hank was out of bullets.
A sparkle of silver drew his eyes to the right. A small stream, glacier-cut and flooded with snowmelt and rain from the passing storm, raced down a series of cataracts. He used his knees to guide Mariah toward it.
Once they’d reached the bank, he goosed Mariah with his heels. She leaped into the middle of the stream with a heavy splash—but from here, they would need to part ways.
Hank let loose the reins, grabbed Kai’s wrist, and rolled out of the saddle downstream of the horse. With his other hand, he managed a fast slap to Mariah’s rump, both as a good-bye and to get her moving.
She jumped out of the river as Hank and Kai hit the freezing-cold water. Kawtch splashed next to them. The current grabbed them all and spun them downstream. The last thing he heard before being dragged underwater was a sharp cry from the girl.
Kai scrambled for the surface, kicking wildly, striking a soft body with her heel. She had been too stunned to react when she was first pulled out of the saddle, but once the cold struck her, it loosed a scream, one trapped inside her since the explosion hours ago.
Then her mouth was full of water.
Out of breath from her yell, she choked as her body was flung around. Slick rocks battered her. Ice-cold water swamped her nose. Then her head was above water again. She coughed and cried. Arms scooped her and pulled her toward shore. She tried to scramble out of the river, but strong hands yanked her back into the water.
“Stay here,” Professor Kanosh hissed. He looked half drowned, his gray hair plastered to his skull. His dog climbed onto a boulder, still standing belly-deep in the stream.
“Why?” she asked, her teeth already beginning to chatter, both from the cold and the terror.
He pointed up.
She searched and spotted the helicopter vanishing over a ridgeline to the west.
“Body heat,” the professor explained. “It was how they were tracking us so well through the woods, why we couldn’t escape. Hopefully they’ll chase Mariah’s big sweating rump deep into the woods. ”
Kai understood. “And the cold water here . . . it helped hide us.”
“A bit of sleight of hand. What sort of Indians would we be if we couldn’t outfox a hunter in the woods?”
Despite the terror of their situation, his eyes smiled. She felt warmer for it.
“Let’s go,” he said, and helped haul her out of the frigid stream.
His dog clambered out after them and shook his coat, spraying water, as if nothing had happened.
Kai tried to do the same herself, shaking her hair, then her jacket, seeking to shed as much of the chill from her body as she could. One of the gold plates fell out of her jacket and struck the ground. Professor Kanosh’s eyes fixed to the plate, but he made no move to take the burden from her. So she retrieved it and returned it alongside the other in her jacket.
Professor Kanosh pointed downhill. “We need to keep moving, keep warm.”
“Where can we go?” she asked, her teeth still chattering.
“First, as far from here as possible. That trick will fool those hunters only until Mariah breaks free of the forest. Once they see her saddle’s empty, they’ll come backtracking, and we want to be long gone.”
“Then what?”
“Back to civilization. Look for help. Get ourselves surrounded by people on our side.”
He headed down the mountain, following a thin deer trail, but she read the worry in his face. She also remembered the call he had interrupted when he found her. Uncle Crowe was some bigwig in Washington, something to do with national security. He was not actually a close relative, but a half uncle on her father’s side—whatever that meant. She had met him only a handful of times, last at her father’s funeral. But all of the Pequot tribe was an extended family. The entire clan was a tangle of bloodlines and family relationships. She had a thousand aunties and uncles. But everyone knew if you were in big trouble, a call to Uncle Crowe could help smooth feathers.
“I know someone who might help us,” she said.
As she walked, she reached into her pants pocket and removed
her cell phone. Water dripped from it after the dunk in the stream. It wouldn’t power up. She scowled and shoved it away. She doubted she could’ve gotten a signal anyway. She’d been lucky earlier to get a single bar when higher up the mountain.
Professor Kanosh noted her efforts. “Okay, then the first order of business is to reach a phone before the hunters regain the scent of our trail. Even if it means turning ourselves over to the state police or the National Guard.”
She tripped a step. “But those were the ones who were trying to kill us.”
“No. I got a look at their uniforms. They were certainly soldiers, but not with any National Guard unit.”
“Then who?”
“Maybe it’s still the government, or maybe a mercenary group looking to cash in on some bounty. Either way, I know only one thing for sure.”
“What’s that?”
His next words chilled her more than the dip in the icy stream. “Whoever they are, they want you dead.”
Chapter 8
May 30, 9:18 P.M.
Salt Lake City, Utah
“Did she at least leave a number?” Painter asked as he climbed into the passenger seat of a Chevy Tahoe with government plates. It sat on the tarmac near the private Gulfstream jet they’d flown from D.C.
Kowalski already sat behind the wheel, cranking the seat back to accommodate his large frame. Their third teammate, Chin, had transferred to a National Guard helicopter heading up to the blast site in the Rocky Mountains—but before Painter could direct his full attention to the anomalous explosion, he had another matter to address.
Kat’s voice sounded tinny over the encrypted line. “That’s all I could get out of your niece. But she sounded scared. And paranoid. She called from a disposable cell phone. But she did leave the cell’s number and asked for you to call her immediately after you landed.”
“Give me the number.”
She did, but she had more news. “Commander Pierce also reported in.” From the grimness of her tone, it didn’t sound like good news. “He’s with Seichan.”
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