Apocalypse

53

‘The quake struck one hour, seven minutes and eight seconds ago, magnitude 6.8.’

Thomas Ryker’s monotone delivery seemed painfully inadequate, as Ethan considered the force of the seismic disaster that had slammed into the Dominican Republic’s shores. A vision flashed into his mind of Lopez being swallowed by churning tectonic plates, or crushed beneath tumbling masonry. He closed his eyes and swallowed an acidic glob that had lodged in his throat.

‘She’ll be fine.’

Jarvis’s hand rested on Ethan’s shoulder. Ethan opened his eyes and sucked in a deep lungful of air.

‘Anything we can get on the source of the seismic waves?’

‘We’re on it,’ Ryker replied, having been brought down to Project Watchman to oversee the GOCE satellite’s data, ‘but it’ll take a while for the computers to crunch the data streams and get a clearly defined picture of what happened.’

‘And no word from either Lopez or Bryson?’ Ethan asked Jarvis.

‘Nothing yet,’ the old man admitted, ‘but they may well be in transit as we speak. The nearest airport is on fairly high ground, so it should have escaped the worst of the damage. If they got to it.’

Ethan nodded vaguely, staring into the distance. An image of Joanna infiltrated his thoughts once again. He had lost her and it had damned-near ruined him. Yet now, even though he might just be able to pick up the threads of his search for her, the thought of losing Lopez filled him with the same cold dread he had felt all those years ago in Palestine. Jarvis’s words reached him from afar.

‘Tom and I did some digging into the background of the fathers of Charles Purcell and Joaquin Abell. Interesting stuff.’

Ethan blinked himself back into the here and now. ‘In what way?’

‘Their connections are undeniable. They worked together on the Manhattan Project back in 1945, and afterward were effectively in direct competition with each other for government funding.’

Ethan made a swift calculation. ‘So there was motive for a murder.’

‘Reason enough,’ Thomas Ryker said, ‘depending on how seriously they took their research.’

‘And there were no two more serious scientists than Abell and Purcell senior,’ Jarvis went on. ‘Both were committed to their causes: Purcell to the development of nuclear weapons and Abell to the development of benign nuclear power through fusion.’

‘You make it sound like Montgomery Purcell was the enemy,’ Ethan said.

‘Perhaps he wasn’t,’ said another voice. Ethan turned to see Mitch Hannah stride into the room and toss his leather flying jacket across a nearby table. ‘Everybody’s assuming that because Charles Purcell’s father wanted to develop nuclear weapons, he must be the bad guy of the story.’

‘Nuclear weapons generally aren’t something that good guys pursue,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘At least Isaac Abell was trying to do something helpful with the technology.’

‘So was Monty Purcell,’ Hannah replied. ‘Just because he wanted to develop weapons doesn’t mean that he wanted to see them used. Most everybody involved in the nuclear programs of the fifties and sixties knew how horrible the weapons were. But their purpose was mutually assured destruction as a deterrent. The Russians were building huge weapons and the only way to ensure the safety of the United States was to build an equivalent arsenal, so that neither side could fire without initiating a global nuclear exchange that would destroy everything and everyone. Essentially, there would be no point in firing as there would be nothing left to gain afterward.’

‘So maybe Monty Purcell wasn’t a warmonger,’ Ethan said. ‘That much I get. But Isaac Abell was the ultimate philanthropist. He turned down major offers of work on government weapons programs to concentrate on nuclear-power generation. It makes him even less of a suspect when it comes to Monty’s mysterious death.’

‘True,’ Mitch Hannah admitted. ‘We know from the witness statements of other people at the meeting on Bimini Island that Isaac Abell went nowhere near Monty Purcell’s aircraft on the day of the meeting, and so could not have tampered with it in any way.’

‘And Purcell was also the first to leave,’ Jarvis said, ‘at about eight in the evening. But that doesn’t mean that Abell couldn’t have hired somebody else to damage the airplane for him, maybe somebody at the airfield?’

‘Unlikely,’ Mitch Hannah said. ‘Purcell maintained his own airplane and was a seasoned pilot. It’s hard to tamper with an aircraft and get away with it, because of all the checks a pilot does before committing to flight. He would have spotted anything wrong with his airplane either before or during take-off.’

‘What then?’ Ethan asked. ‘How could Isaac Abell have possibly had anything to do with the crash?’

Mitch Hannah opened a map of the Florida Straits and set it down on the table between them, jabbing a finger at Bimini Island.

‘Purcell takes off from here, and only has to fly to here.’ Mitch pointed at Miami. ‘About sixty nautical miles away, which in a light aircraft means a flight time of maybe thirty to forty minutes at his logged cruise-height of five thousand feet. The big clue, and what ties his death in with Isaac Abell, is the time that he took off: 8:41in the evening, on October 9, 1964.’

Ethan thought for a moment.

‘He’d be flying at night.’

‘On instruments,’ Mitch confirmed, ‘over the ocean. I checked the weather records for that night, and Monty Purcell would have been flying either in or above solid cloud, with no horizon.’

Ethan looked at Jarvis, whose face was shining with intrigue.

‘So he’s entirely reliant upon his instruments, and if they were to somehow go wrong…?’ the old man suggested.

Ethan looked at Mitch Hannah.

‘When did Isaac Abell get his undersea laboratory operational?’

Thomas Ryker answered.

‘October 4, 1964,’ he said. ‘And he’d scheduled a test of the topamak magnetic field generator at…’ The kid’s voice trailed off as he realized the connection. ‘I’ll be damned — nine o’clock on October 9.’

Ethan ran a hand through his hair.

‘Isaac Abell deliberately schedules a test of his fusion chamber the same evening that Purcell is flying overhead. All he needed to do was keep him on Bimini late enough that his flight would coincide with the test.’

Mitch Hannah tapped his finger on the map.

‘A test of a device that powerful would have almost certainly produced fields sufficient to completely destroy or otherwise render useless all of the analogue instruments in a Cessna 150B of that era, Purcell’s airplane. Monty Purcell wouldn’t have stood a chance — without visual references to keep his airplane in level flight, he would have lost spatial orientation within seconds and probably hit the ocean within a couple of minutes.’

Ethan looked at the map.

‘You said that the test of Abell’s device was at nine o’clock in the evening,’ he said to Ryker, who nodded. ‘And he took off at 8:41?’

‘Yes,’ Mitch said, immediately catching on to Ethan’s train of thought. ‘Assuming an average speed of maybe ninety knots over twenty-one minutes…’

‘… He’d have covered about thirty nautical miles,’ Ethan finished, and pressed his finger onto a spot on the map that marked the edge of the Miami Terrace reef. ‘And gone down right about here.’

The four men stared at the map for a long moment.

‘That’s where the underwater facility must be,’ Jarvis said finally.

Thomas Ryker nodded.

‘If it matches the data we get from the seismic-monitoring stations and GOCE, then we’ve found the IRIS base.’

Ethan was about to speak when the door to the room opened and a soldier popped his head through to speak to Jarvis.

‘We’ve had contact, sir,’ the soldier said. ‘A transport left Puerto Plata just over an hour ago.’

‘Is Nicola Lopez aboard?’ Ethan demanded, as though he’d never left the Corps.

‘Unknown, sir,’ the marine replied. ‘American survivors of the quake are due at the airport in Miami in just over an hour.’

Ethan was walking for the door before he’d even realized it.