Deep Fire Rising

DS-TWO MINE AREA 51, NEVADA

Ira Lasko wasn’t waiting in the cave when Mercer and Sykes emerged from the flooded mine. He wasn’t in the control van either. Mercer, still wearing his borrowed wet suit and oblivious to the sharp stones that cut into his bare feet as he searched the camp, found his friend in the rec hall. Dr. Briana Marie was with him, her lab coat tossed over a sofa as she and Ira conferred over a thick binder.

Both simply glanced up when he crashed through the door. Dr. Marie closed the file and leaned back in her chair. Ira ran a hand across his bald head. The only sound was a steady whir from an air conditioner and the drip of seawater off Mercer’s body. He threw his flippers into a corner.

“Nuclear physicist?” he taunted Briana. “How about Harry fucking Houdini?”

“You were told not to enter the cavern,” she snapped back.

“Easy, Doctor,” Ira said.

“He isn’t cleared for this project, Admiral. You assured me he could complete the tunnel to the cavern and not ask questions.”

Ira shot her a hard look. “I don’t like lying to my friends and I’ve done it long enough. It’s over.” He turned to Mercer. “I didn’t have a choice. The orders came straight from the secretary of defense and the president’s office.”

Mercer heard the sincerity in Ira’s voice, saw the shame in his eyes. This was the Ira he’d known and agreed to work for. The tension lines that had etched his face seemed to be relaxing with each passing second. Mercer unzipped his wet suit and used a handful of paper napkins stored in a sideboard to wipe water from his eyes and dry the hair on his chest. Whatever he was about to hear, he knew he’d need to sit for it. He’d probably need a drink too, but the camp was dry.

“That cavern,” he said, “it’s not natural, is it?”

“No,” Ira replied, “it’s not. It was formed when the submarine refocused.”

“Refocused? What does that mean?”

Ira hesitated. “I think it’s best if Dr. Marie explains it.”

For a moment she seemed to struggle between the need to keep her project secret and the desire to brag about her work. And then it came in a rush of pride.

“How much do you know about quantum physics, Dr. Mercer?”

“It’s the realm of the subatomic, where the rules we live by, like gravity and magnetism, no longer apply. Most everything I’ve read about it is so counterintuitive that I tend to ignore it.”

She nodded. “A reasonable and honest answer. There are only a handful of scientists in the world who wouldn’t give that exact same response. And yet what you don’t know is that it is the branch of physics that will one day revolutionize the way we live our lives.”

“I don’t think the ability to move a submarine into a mountain is going to better my life any time soon,” Mercer said sarcastically, still riled by all the lies he’d been told.

She didn’t like his flippant comment and her tone became brusque. “Well, then how is this for counterintuitive, Doctor — we didn’t move the submarine into the mountain. In fact, the sub never moved at all.”

Mercer held up a supplicating hand. Antagonizing her wasn’t going to get the answers he wanted. “Could you start from the beginning, please? In laymen’s terms.”

“All right. What is the fastest possible speed in the universe?”

“The speed of light. One hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second.”

“Newton’s second law of thermodynamics basically states that all systems decay into chaos, right?”

“I believe so.”

“Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound?”

“What does this have to do with that submarine?”

“Please answer the question.”

“Sure, why wouldn’t it?”

“In the quantum world, you just gave three wrong answers. The study of the subatomic came about from the work of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. One of the principles all subsequent research has been based on is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In the simplest terms it means that observing an event alters its outcome. Therefore nothing in the universe happens without direct observation. It sounds arrogant, I know, that we, the observers, make things happen by our very presence, but it has been proven in the lab dozens of times. That means the tree in the forest can’t make a sound because it never fell.

“And in the world of the subatomic, both in time and in space, order can spontaneously arise from chaos. Albeit for fractions of a second, but even that short time span refutes Newton’s second law.”

“And the galactic speed limit?” Mercer pressed. “The speed of light?”

“What if I told you I’ve seen an experiment where a beam of laser light that was shot through a gas medium at extremely low temperatures actually came out the other side of the chamber before it was fired. Effect came before cause. Somehow in the quantum world, a message traveling faster than the speed of light was relayed to the detector that the laser beam was coming.”

Mercer didn’t doubt her claims. He was more aware than most that the immutable laws of the past were falling to scientific breakthroughs at an ever-accelerating pace. Yet he couldn’t fully grasp the implications, or how this got a submarine weighing a thousand tons or more into a mountain hundreds of miles from the sea.

“Now, what if we take that experiment one step further? What if we could do it with particles? In one sense, that is what light is, a particle we call a photon.”

“You’d have a particle existing at two places at once.”

“And what if in the process of shooting the particle, the original you started with gets destroyed?”

“You’d end up with a duplicate particle on the other side of your super-cold gas chamber.” The realization hit like a body blow. “You’re talking about some kind of science fiction transporter system.”

She gave him a pained grimace. “That isn’t how it is. There’s no ‘Beam me up, Scotty’. The media keeps hyping the possibility, but in truth transporting a human being, while possible in the abstract, will never be practical.”

“But is that what you wanted to do with the submarine? Transport it to Area 51?”

Her expression turned even more sour. “No, but we were afraid it might happen. You see, our aim was to make it invisible. We call it optoelectric camouflage. It’s designed for surface ships and perhaps aircraft if we can scale down the necessary equipment and reduce the power consumption. We used a sub because there was a theoretical chance something like this could happen.”

Ira interrupted. “It got away from them.”

“It didn’t get away from us,” she said curtly. “The navy was told about this possibility. We built in the fail-safes.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“The system my team and I developed uses a bubble of intense magnetism to bend visible light into a toroid, a kind of doughnut shape. We observe an object because light is reflected off its surface. Some wavelengths get absorbed and the ones that bounce back give the object its color. Now, something that is black will absorb all the wavelengths, so we can’t see it, yet we perceive its presence against a colored background. My theory was that if we could trap the light in a toroid so it couldn’t escape, and then bend it around the object, the observer wouldn’t see anything. It would be like how water bends light so a pencil looks disjointed if half of it sticks above the surface.

“And?” Mercer prompted, because while what she was saying sounded far-fetched, it wasn’t an explanation for what he’d seen in the mine.

“We ran into the quantum world,” she said as if that clarified everything.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning there was a consequence we had considered, took precautions against, but rejected as a real concern. The magnetic field bent visible light until it became a self-sustaining loop, a point in space in which light itself couldn’t escape.”

“Hold it, that sounds like a black hole.”

“No. Black holes are the collapse of matter due to gravity. We were using magnetism.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The difference is that gravity hasn’t been reconciled with the quantum world. It was what Einstein was working on when he died, a grand theory of everything — nuclear forces, magnetism and gravity.”

“So you stumbled onto something new.”

“Yet the consequences are the same.”

“What consequences?”

“For lack of a better way of putting it, we stopped time. The magnetic pressure, like gravity at a black hole, created a bubble around the test submarine. As the light within that bubble became trapped, the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle took over.”

“So your experiment no longer had an observer?”

“And in the quantum world when there is no observer, nothing happens. That tree in the forest is still standing until someone goes out to look at it.”

“What did that do to your sub?”

“In essence, for the submarine time stopped and the rest of the universe vanished. A couple of scientists on our team thought this could have happened. That’s why we took precautions. We installed a trigger device using quantum entwining that would cut the power to the magnetic sphere around the submarine and return the normal flow of time. In theory it would reappear in our world.”

“Only you missed and it came back in Nevada. Why?”

“ ‘Tide and time wait for no man,’ ” she quoted. “We didn’t miss at all. The earth rotates at more than a thousand miles an hour and travels around the sun even faster. Factor in our solar system’s rotation in the Milky Way and you can see we didn’t do half bad just returning the sub back to our own planet. It could have just as easily refocused in orbit or on the far side of the moon. We couldn’t bring it back in the ocean because we couldn’t guarantee that the sub could come back above its crush depth, so it was decided to trigger its return at a remote secure facility on land. Area 51 was the perfect location.”

“DS-Two?”

“Destination Site Two,” Ira said. “The primary return coordinates were the area the sub first vanished off Jacksonville, Florida, the hope being that if it did fade out it would only be for an instant.”

Ira’s use of the word “fade” was what triggered the memory. It was one of the favorite stories told by UFO enthusiasts, conspiracy nuts and believers in the absurd.

“You’re describing the Philadelphia Experiment,” Mercer said.

“That story was what piqued my interest in physics,” Dr. Marie admitted.

Though debunked by the very man who started the myth, the Philadelphia Experiment remained a popular topic in fringe Internet chat rooms. The legend centered around a navy vessel, the USS Eldridge. As the story goes, during World War Two a secret program, Project Rainbow, was initiated by Einstein and the famed inventor Nicola Tesla. They wanted to create a light-bending camouflage using enormous magnetic pressures to hide Allied ships from Nazi U-boats. A newly commissioned destroyer was outfitted with all sorts of scientific gear including massive electric generators. During the first experiments, everything seemed to go as planned. A green-blue fog grew around the vessel when the equipment was turned on and moments later the ship faded from view. It reappeared when the power was cut.

The experiment was repeated several times until August 1943. Some adjustments were made to the ship and when the system was activated again it faded into a fog, only this time it reappeared an instant later in Norfolk, Virginia. A few moments later it returned to Philadelphia and emerged from the unnatural mist. If this tale wasn’t fantastic enough, a witness aboard a nearby cargo ship, the SS Andrew Furuseth, named Carlos Allende, reported seeing some members of her crew walking around in a daze, while others continued to fade in and out, as if they were ghosts. He claimed that still others were fused to the ship’s deck, grotesque mannequins caught in poses of unimaginable agony.

“But that was bullshit!” Mercer exclaimed. “I remember reading that years later Allende himself admitted to making up the whole story. Besides which, it was proved the Eldridge was never in Philly and Einstein was busy working on the Manhattan Project.”

Briana Marie smiled for the first time since Mercer had burst into the rec room. “Do you think the fact that it never really happened matters? Science is the melding of experimentation and inspiration. Where the ideas come from is irrelevant. There are countless examples of inventions being inspired by legends, myths, and science fiction. Dick Tracy’s wrist radio was just a fantasy in the 1930s, but you don’t question the cell phone. Jules Verne described an atomic-powered submarine almost a century before Admiral Rickover built the USS Nautilus, which he named after Verne’s creation. Science fiction preceded the laser, radar, sonar, space travel, cloning, and hundreds of other technologies. Don’t you think we scientists are influenced by what we read as children, thinking that someday we could make real what those authors only dreamed about?” She became heated.

“I’ve spent my professional life trying to realize the bullshit of the Philadelphia Experiment and you saw the goddamn proof.”

“Okay,” Mercer retreated. “I’ll admit that I have read a little about quantum teleportation. But all that’s ever been achieved is a couple thousand atoms, basically a ball of gas that was shot from one side of a lab to another. You’re telling me you can move an entire submarine, composed of an incalculable number of atoms, and reassemble it exactly the way it was.”

“This isn’t quantum teleportation.” She blew a breath. “That word again. This is something new. I call it a magnetic sink. We didn’t deconstruct the sub. We removed it from one of the four known dimensions — the three cardinal points and time. Remove any one dimension from an object and it ceases to be. A shadow is a perfect example. It is a two-dimensional facsimile of an object, but not the object itself. I proved that the same principle works with time. We took the sub out of our time and then brought it back.

“And even you can’t be so naïve to think military research isn’t years ahead of what gets published in the scientific journals. The military had supersonic flight thirty years before Concorde and GPS tracking decades before it became commercially available. The ball of gas experiment you mentioned was ancient history to my project team.”

“How long was it gone?” Mercer asked, trying to get the conversation back from the abstract.

She looked at Ira, again seeking permission to divulge another secret.

He answered for her. “Almost twelve months.”

They’d had to wait for the earth to nearly circle the sun before they could return the boat to — Mercer didn’t know the right word — reality?

“The orbital calculations had to be unbelievably precise,” Briana Marie added with pride. “We had to factor in longitude, latitude and altitude. Getting it to return to a secure location like Area 51 meant it would refocus deep underground. That is why we needed miners to tunnel an access shaft. A delay of even a few seconds would have seen the sub return outside of Bakersfield, California, at an altitude of eight thousand feet. A few seconds earlier and it would have come back eleven thousand feet under Lake Powell, Utah.”

“Ah, how long ago did you bring it back?” Mercer asked, sensing he already knew.

Ira’s cell phone rang. He pulled it from the inside pocket of his coat and pushed his rolling chair out of immediate earshot. Dr. Marie answered for him. “Four months ago.”

Something happened out there, something not natural. It was Tisa’s voice Mercer heard in his head. He’d earlier dismissed her comments. Now they sounded like a warning. A bubble erupted in the earth, like a contained nuclear explosion that only lasted a second. Her group had detected the submarine reemerging from wherever it had drifted for the past year.

A thought struck him. Why the hell would they care?

They should have assumed the seismic jolt was just an earthquake. Surely other seismograph stations had recorded it and just as quickly discounted it. Central Nevada was a jigsaw of shallow fault lines. Why were they so focused on this single event? Focused enough to try to sabotage the tunneling operation. Was there a leak in Dr. Marie’s department, a whistleblower or a traitor who’d divulged the secret?

Mercer’s head pounded from the shortened decompression stops he and Sykes had been forced to take. He’d seen the proof of Dr. Marie’s work even if he couldn’t grasp the science behind it. For now he’d put that out of his mind. The questions that needed answering were about Tisa Nguyen and her group. Mercer had deliberately withheld how she had rescued him from the Luxor Hotel, but he knew now he’d have to tell Ira. If Dr. Marie’s team had a leak, it had to be plugged.

Ira had said little during his phone conversation. His expression was grim when he wheeled himself back to the table. “The navy just lost a ship in the Pacific, a cargo vessel. Preliminary search-and-rescue report no survivors. No debris either.”

Wait, I can give you some evidence. Something unusual is about to happen in the Pacific Ocean. Something involving your group? Mercer had asked. Yes, Tisa had replied.

Mercer lost all interest in what Dr. Marie had been telling him. “What happened?” His voice cracked in the sudden silence.

“Unknown. A civilian research ship heard the mayday and is just reaching the last known position. Preliminary intel from Pacific Command reports the ship hit an iceberg, but they were in tropical waters. I’m betting she was rammed by a submarine coming to the surface or maybe a large cargo container that had washed off a freighter. Her last radio call said the ocean had caught fire. I think a container carrying volatile materials split open when the ship hit it and ignited somehow.”

How do I convince you that the world is about to end? Again Mercer heard Tisa in his head. Obviously me just blurting it out won’t be enough, so I need to show you some kind of proof. And the only way to make that work is if I gain your trust through incremental steps. Are you with me so far?

This had been late in their conversation. At the time, Mercer still wasn’t sure what to make of the beguiling woman. She seemed rational and totally illogical at the same time. He supposed many mentally ill people sounded the same way. She was trying to convince him, yes, but she didn’t sound as if her world revolved around convincing others of what she believed. Conspiracy addicts needed affirmation to keep themselves from thinking they were nuts. That’s why they fed off each other so much and why the Internet was full of chat rooms concerning the paranormal. But Tisa wasn’t like that. She wanted Mercer to believe her, not because she couldn’t bear him disagreeing. More, it was like she wanted his help and the only way to gain it was to draw him into her world.

Tisa must have known this when she said something unusual was going to happen in the Pacific. By doling out information like breadcrumbs she could convince him to follow the trail to Santorini, where presumably he’d learn another truth, perhaps what she meant by “the world was about to end.” One thing was clear. He had to be involved with the search for the ship if he was to learn anything further.

“There’s another possibility,” he said slowly, looking Ira in the eye. “I held back some information about my escape from the Luxor Hotel. Something rather critical.”

It took fifteen minutes to fill in the details of how Tisa had rescued him, how she appeared to be on the run from her own organization and how she believed the end of the world was coming.

“I’m just as skeptical as you, Ira,” Mercer concluded. “I wouldn’t have even brought this up if too many coincidences hadn’t already fallen into place.” He ticked them off with his fingers. “The cave-in that killed most of your first work crew, which I suspect was Donny Randall’s handiwork, considering his attempt on my life. The fact Tisa knew when the sub re — what was your word? — refocused at Area 51. The gunmen at my hotel. Tisa’s well-timed rescue. And now a navy ship sinks in the Pacific under unusual circumstances.

“There are two ways to read this. Either someone on Dr. Marie’s staff leaked information about their experiment and it somehow fell into the hands of a group that wants to stop it for some reason…” Mercer trailed off.

“Or?” Marie and Lasko said as one.

“Or they detected the sub refocusing, knew the seismic disturbance wasn’t natural and sent a team to investigate. Judging by their organizational sophistication and logistical support, I don’t think this is a new group formed as a result of your work here. They’ve been around for a while, only we’ve never done anything that put us in their sights.”

“Why should my experiment ‘put us in their sights,’ as you say?”

Mercer leaned back in his chair. The wet suit was drying and his entire body itched. “I suspect the answer lies out there where the ship sank.”

“And in Greece?” Ira asked.

Mercer thought about it, considered the pattern Tisa had set out for him. “No, I think there I’m only going to find more questions.”

“You’re still going.” Ira made it sound like an order.

Mercer turned it into a bargaining chip. “Only if you get me to the Pacific to see for myself what happened to the navy’s ship.”

Ira didn’t hesitate. This was exactly the kind of mission he’d expected Mercer to tackle as special science advisor. “I’ll make the arrangements.”

“What happens here?” Mercer asked.

“We’ll finish pumping out the mine so Dr. Marie’s people can get to the sub. I guess then they all head back to their drawing boards and the navy writes off a hundred million dollar mistake.”