The Brave and the Bold

by Hans G. Schantz

  “We bury this here time capsule here on Sea Island in commemoration of this meeting, that it may remind our descendants, a century hence, of our times and of these historic past few days.”

  The crowd and assembled dignitaries applauded. The audience began to disperse around me, heading for the buses back to Savannah, or for the closing press conferences from each of the world leaders.

  I stood still a moment, studying the program for the closing ceremony and the background information on the Crypt of Civilization.

  Of course.

  I finally had the answer I’d been seeking.

  Why had it taken me so long to figure it out?

  Amit and I joined a select group of Civic Youth – those who had demonstrated the right combination of talent and compliance – to join the Presidential Motorcade to Hunter Army Air Field near Savannah. I was dying to whisper my secrets into his ear, but I had to assume we were under constant surveillance by professionals. We flew from there to Andrews Air Force Base on board Air Force One. President Lieberman even autographed a box of Presidential M&M candies for me. Then, we rode into Washington in yet another van, following in the wake of one of the two official Presidential motorcades.

  We attended a State Dinner at the White House where more platitudes were mouthed. The mood was somber. Conversation was hushed.

  “Did you see the latest?”

  “”Do you think they know about…?”

  “What else is coming?”

  Last minute cancellations left the State Dining Room noticeably below capacity.

  It was at the State Dinner that Rob played our last card.

  A pair of tuxedoed men swiftly escorted President Lieberman out of the room. Several others abandoned wives and husbands to follow. The rest of us only found out hours later in the lobby of the hotel where we’d been bussed.

  “Lost nuclear weapon found on Jekyll Island,” scrolled below the talking heads on CNN as they breathlessly conveyed the latest updates.

  The peculiar “tank” with fins we found under the Horton House? It was a Mark 15 nuclear bomb “missing” since a 1958 “accident” off Tybee Island. Stripped of its high explosives and plutonium core, it had been abandoned there for a while, but it would take hours for the investigators to discover what Rick and his team had already figured out. They’d be operating under a worst case assumption – if the bomb detonated at the rated 3.8 megaton intensity, it would leave a gaping crater in the north end of Jekyll Island, wipe out most every building on the island, and devastate not only Brunswick, Saint Simon, and Sea Island as well. They were already evacuating the entire area before sending in a Nuclear Emergency Response Team to secure the site.

  The pattern was obvious once we’d looked into it.

  Despite all the security, The U.S. had lost a number of nuclear weapons. In 1956, a B-47 carrying two cores for a Mark 15 thermonuclear bomb vanished on a flight from McDill Air Force Base to the Mediterranean. The flight path was just off Jekyll Island. In 1958, a complete Mark 15 bomb was lost off Tybee Island, a hundred miles north. In 1961, a B-52 carrying two 24-megaton nuclear bombs crashed near Goldsboro, North Carolina. One bomb was never found. “Buried and never recovered,” the official reports said. In all, over the course of five years, The U.S. lost four nuclear bombs, and all four were lost in the southeast, not far from Jekyll Island.

  Why had Xueshu Quan masterminded the thefts? What had he – or it – done with the missing nuclear material? We had no idea. Records like that were not included in the material we’d stolen from the Civic Circle.

  After the dinner, a Civic Circle representative went around to book flights home for the Civic Youth. “We’ll both fly into Atlanta,” I pre-empted Amit. Amit knew something had to be up. Knoxville made more sense. He said nothing and went off to his own assigned room.

  I spent an hour watching the news. For once, the 24-hour news channels had no trouble finding enough content. Pundits and politicians alike were busy trying to save their own skins and explain away what had been dubbed the “Wilson Files.” The revelations of the past few days had obliterated any momentum toward war. The disclosure that a missing hydrogen bomb had been found next door to the G-8 Summit was just making the rubble bounce – yet another momentous disaster as the cherry to top a heaping mound of just desserts.

  I sent a text message to Rob asking him to pick us up in Atlanta. The message included a coded passphrase so he’d know where to meet us. I went to sleep under the watchful eye of a smoke detector.

  “What’s going on?” Amit whispered as we waited at the gate at Washington Reagan International Airport to depart.

  I shook my head no. “Later,” I whispered back.

  Our last-minute flight did not include adjacent seating.

  I caught up with Amit as he lingered, slowly moving up the jet way.

  “OK,” Amit whispered. “Now what’s going on?”

  “Leave your phone off and unplugged,” I whispered back. “Follow ten seconds behind me.”

  We’d arrived at the C concourse of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and caught the underground PlaneTrain toward the main terminal. I waited until the last moment and jumped out at the stop for the A concourse. Amit narrowly missed being caught by the door. I led Amit along the underground tunnel, making sure no one was following us. When we got to the Terminal Gates, I hopped on the escalator. Amit followed, closing the gap.

  “The main terminal is actually the next stop,” Amit noted.

  “I know,” I explained. The terminal gate concourse has a separate exit. If anyone is waiting for us at the main terminal exit, they’ll miss us.”

  We caught a cab to Centennial Park, just south of the Tech campus. I paid cash. We met Rob there, and climbed in his truck.

  “OK, Pete,” Amit said. “’Fess up. What’s the big mystery?”

  “Where are we going?” Rob asked.

  “I’m going to take you to where Angus MacGuffin hid the Nexus Detector and the Red Flower Tong’s secret scrolls.”

  I pointed off to the east. “Thataway.”

  Chapter 17: Epilogue

  The gothic gray granite towers of Phoebe Hearst Hall loomed over the meticulously landscaped grounds of Oglethorpe University. The building radiated an impression of permanence in the bright August Atlanta sun, a sense it would stand forever.

  The Oglethorpe coat-of-arms perched above the door – three boars' heads on a field granite, slashed with a stone chevron. Below, the builders carved an inscription, just above the entrance, into the solid rock: “A search is the thing He hath taught you, For Height and for Depth and for Wideness.”

  We walked around the building. I tried the side door; it was open. I motioned to Amit and Rob to join me. We went in and down the stairs to the basement. The building was quiet, except for the hum of a vending machine’s refrigerator. There was no obvious sign that this nondescript academic hallway hid a terrible secret: a secret that the Civic Circle would kill to keep. No sign, that is, until we reached a polished steel door that looked like it would be more at home in a high-security vault instead of an academic building. What we were looking at was not a vault, however. It was a crypt.

  The Crypt of Civilization.

  An engraved steel plaque was riveted to the door.

  This Crypt

  contains memorials of the civilization which existed in the United States and the world at large during the first half of the twentieth century. In receptacles of stainless steel, in which the air has been replaced by inert gases, are encyclopedias, histories, scientific works, special editions of newspapers, travelogues, travel talks, cinema reels, models, phonograph records, and similar materials from which an idea of the state and nature of the civilization which existed from 1900 to 1950 can be ascertained. No jewels or precious metals are included.

  We depend upon the laws of the county of DeKalb, the State of Georgia, and the government of the United States and their heirs, assigns, and successors, and upon t
he sense of sportsmanship of posterity for the continued preservation of this vault until the year 8113, at which time we direct that it shall be opened by authorities representing the above governmental agencies and the administration of Oglethorpe University. Until that time we beg of all persons that this door and the contents of the crypt within may remain inviolate.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States

  Eugene Talmadge, Governor of Georgia

  Oglethorpe University by Thornwell Jacobs, President

  Anno Domini, 1936, Ab Universitate Recondita Anno Vicesimo Tertio

  “Allow me to introduce MacGuffin’s ‘thorny’ friend, and fellow Presbyterian, Thornwell Jacobs,” I explained to Rob and Amit. I could see the realization dawning on their faces.

  “But, it says 1936,” Amit began. “MacGuffin was murdered…”

  “In 1940,” I interrupted him. “Just weeks before Thornwell Jacobs sealed the vault permanently.” I pointed to another poster next to the door:

  The Oglethorpe University Crypt of Civilization

  From 1936 until 1940, Oglethorpe University executed detailed plans to build an extraordinary time capsule designed to store records for more than six thousand years. The result was the Crypt of Civilization, which the Guinness Book of World Records (1990) hailed as the “first successful attempt to bury a record for any future inhabitants or visitors to the planet earth.” The visionary of this quest was university president Dr. Thornwell Jacobs, who has been called “the father of the modern time capsule.”

  While engaged in teaching and research, Jacobs was struck by the scarcity of information on ancient civilizations. In November 1936 in Scientific American Magazine, he explained an idea to store contemporary records for posterity. Jacobs wrote of a unique plan to show the manner of life in 1936, as well as the accumulated knowledge of humankind prior to that time. His plan was to preserve consciously, for the first time in history, a thorough record of civilization in what he called a “Crypt.”

  “One of those stainless steel cylinders,” Rob said, studying the photograph of the Crypt’s contents, “contains MacGuffin’s scrolls and the Nexus Detector. We’re standing just a few feet away from it…”

  “…on the other side of a vault door,” Amit studied the dome over what was probably the lock and handle. “Who has the combination?”

  “I understand it’s been welded shut,” I offered.

  “So near, and yet so far,” Amit examined the polished steel door. “The walls?”

  “It used to be a swimming pool,” I explained. “Two-foot thick stone floor. Seven-foot thick stone roof. The whole thing is carved out of granite. The crypt is ten feet high, ten feet wide, and twenty feet deep.”

  “Granite,” Rob was shaking his head. “Damn hard stuff. We’d have to blast. It’d be easier to get in through the door. Explosives might damage the contents in that confined space. An arc welding rig, or maybe even an oxy-fuel torch…” his comment trailed off as he analyzed how he might cut open the door.

  I looked at them both. “I’ve been thinking about something Rick told me. Rick said, ‘They won’t give back our country without a fight.’ He was mostly right, but not the way he, and you, Rob, have been thinking.”

  “What do you mean?” Rob looked puzzled as I interrupted his analysis of fuel mixes and melting points.

  “It’s not your kind of fight, Rob. Not a fight of weapons and violence,” I caught him before he could interrupt me. “True, the Albertian attack weakened them, and I’m sure force and firepower will have a place in what’s to come.

  “This is what it’s about.” I pointed to the vault door. “It’s a fight of ancient puzzles and fantastic new technologies. It’s going to be a fight of ideas, of propaganda, of persuasion, and of new discoveries.

  “The Civic Circle has been weakened by scandal,” I pointed out. “Many of their minions in government are compromised. The Albertians even managed to kill a few of them. The organization as a whole is far from dead, however. They’re going to be back, rebuilding their team, seeking out their enemies, securing their hold on power. They’ll redouble their efforts to infiltrate Georgia Tech. We have to be ready for them. We have to access this vault and retrieve MacGuffin’s cache. We have to design, debug, and implement a Nexus Detector of our own.”

  “We beat them last year when we were the rookies playing against the veterans,” Amit pointed out. “We wiped out Gomulka, literally. We’ll chew right through their second-string agitators and spit them out.”

  “Don’t get cocky,” I cautioned Amit. “Last year all we had to face was Gomulka, and he still came close to victory. In a sense, he won. We may have kept him from placing Cindy Ames in charge of the Engineering School, but he removed Chen and Graf. Two for one isn’t a great exchange rate, not when we’re so badly outnumbered. Now Ames is coming back, too, and the whole attention of the Civic Circle will be on the Georgia Tech campus trying to complete the convergence they attempted last year. They’ll be trying hard. We have to shut them down, harder, so they don’t try again.”

  “Getting into the vault, I can do.” Rob examined the shiny steel door. “The challenge is doing it quickly, finding what we want among the clutter,” he gestured to the photo of the crypt’s contents, “and getting out without being detected.”

  “So,” Amit summarized, “the ride never ends. We have to win another ideological battle on campus, secretly break into a vault that’s supposed to be sealed for the next six thousand years, identify and retrieve MacGuffin’s cache, design and build a Nexus Detector of our own, and somehow do all this without getting caught or detected by the Civic Circle.”

  “Who now have their guard up,” Rob cautioned. “It won’t take the Civic Circle long to realize some third enemy is on the rise, rallying the Albertians and the Red Flower Tong, taking the fight to a new level.”

  “How are we going to do all that?” Amit asked.

  “I don’t know, exactly,” I acknowledged, “but one thing is clear.”

  I looked at Amit and Rob.

  “It’s going to take a hell of an engineer.”

  Look for Peter’s continuing adventures in

  A Hell of an Engineer, Book 4 of The Hidden Truth.

  About The Brave and the Bold

  This is the section of the book where I provide the tips, hints, and clues needed to begin sorting out where the fiction ends and the underlying facts start.

  First though, I have a request of you.

  Please leave a review.

  I like five-star reviews that gush about how my book was perfect as much as the next author, but if you didn’t like something for some reason, or if something just didn’t work for you, please feel free to explain why and mark it down accordingly. I’d rather have a one-star review with some helpful feedback than no review at all. You won’t hurt my feelings, let alone with a three- or four-star review that expresses some criticism.

  Here’s what I’ll do for you in return: not only will I read every review, but also I will provide a reply to everyone who leaves a review. Leave a review, ask a question, leave a comment – I will reply, although depending on the volume of reviews, it may not be immediately.

  I’m delighted you chose to honor me with your book reading time and money. However, I have many demands on my own time, and lots of projects more remunerative than fiction writing I could be spending that time on. I’m going to take a vacation from fiction writing for a while to prioritize those other projects. I cannot at present say when to expect A Hell of an Engineer, the next installment of The Hidden Truth. I’ll get around to it. Eventually.

  I make my readers this promise, however. If I have at least one hundred true fans who like The Brave and the Bold enough to leave reviews, I will begin working on A Hell of an Engineer. You can expect to see A Hell of an Engineer within a year of the hundredth review posting for The Brave and the Bold. You’ll find updates on my blog at aetherczar.com or my Twitter and Gab feeds where I am
@aetherczar.

  Don’t cheat, though.

  It’s not going to help to leave phony reviews from phony accounts. All that will accomplish is to get me in trouble with Amazon. The integrity of the review process is very important. Honest reviews from honest readers only, please.

  This is a work of fiction, but The Brave and the Bold draws heavily on real-world history, science, philosophy, and events within our own timeline. Here are a few of the more interesting examples.

  Did the NSA actually kill ultrawideband (UWB) radio technology? Technology columnist and raconteur, Robert X. Cringely, thinks so, and said as much in a column a few years back.

  Kenneth A. Norton, the FCC engineer, played a critical role in justifying the FCC’s suppression of Edwin Howard Armstrong’s FM radio technology at the behest of industrial giants who felt threatened by it. See Ken Burns’ documentary, Empire of the Air, or the book by Tom Lewis. Norton really did also come to an erroneous conclusion on the nonexistence of Zenneck Surface Waves (ZSW). ZSW technology does hold the promise of realizing Tesla’s vision of global wireless power distribution, a technology strangled in its infancy by J.P. Morgan, who refused to finance Tesla’s scheme to fruition and cut the funding. In Morgan’s defense, the “free power to the world” concept is a tough business model to justify, yet there may well be a way to make it a viable business. I expect we’ll all be hearing a lot more about the incredible potential of ZSW technology in the next few years. Assuming the Civic Circle doesn’t successfully suppress it, of course.

  Now that’s two real-world strikes against Norton in my fictional universe which by my rule makes it merely coincidence. However careful readers will note there is a third subtle clue from Book 1 Pete has overlooked which elevates Norton’s role to “enemy action.”