The Lightning Stones

28

There hadn’t been time to find design schematics of the Akademik Zhukovsky, but they had studied plans for the general cargo ship on which she’d been based. They knew in which hold the original control room had most likely been constructed, and they figured in this latest incarnation it would be where the ship’s nuclear power plant’s output would be directed and converted to some form of emitted radiation. Jason believed it was the likeliest spot where the crystals would be stored so the energy could be channeled through them and finally beamed into the atmosphere.

Booker led Mercer through the door where the cigarette smoker had stood earlier. The interior of the ship was dimmed down to red battle lights to conserve energy, and even as they stood waiting to hear any movement, the air-conditioning system shut down with a sigh of slowing fans. The other thing they didn’t know is how well protected the ship would be. Just because they saw no guards on deck didn’t mean there weren’t any aboard.

They started down the dull-green-painted hall. They weren’t interested in sweeping the entire ship, so they ignored any closed doors they passed, only checking the rooms they could look into. They found one person on the main deck, a ship’s maintenance specialist who was working in a bathroom. He was on his knees surrounded by plumber’s tools torquing on an open pipe fitting. He turned in time to see the men loom up behind him but never got a word out before Booker clocked him on the back of the head with the Kriss’s retractable stock. It was a well-measured blow that rolled the plumber’s eyes into his skull and collapsed him over his wrenches.

Sykes tied his wrists behind his back with plastic zip ties, and they moved on.

Moments later the PA system chimed again, and the same voice came over the speakers. “Huit minutes.”

Mercer flashed eight fingers for Booker’s benefit. They were seriously running out of time.

A door opened behind them. Mercer turned to see a man emerge from a cabin followed seconds later by two more. It was too far and too dark to tell who they were. He watched them for a moment longer, trying to determine if they were a threat, when one of the men spotted him in the hallway. There must have been rules in place about where personnel should be during the final critical moments before the experiment, because he shouted and suddenly the three were reaching for their weapons.

Mercer fired two quick shots that forced the other men back into the cabin.

“Go!” he shouted to Book. “I’ll hold them. Stop the test.”

Sykes took off running, presenting a remarkably small target for such a big man. Mercer flattened himself against the wall behind a six-inch pipe stanchion, his pistol extended and ready.

The corridor exploded in a riot of hot lead and muzzle flashes as a machine pistol on full auto was unloaded in his direction. The onslaught was terrifying, and ricochets careened down the passage, but nothing came close to hitting him. He loosened another pair of rounds to tell the guards they’d missed, but his position was untenable and so he withdrew. Mercer ran through a door that led to a ladderway. He scrambled down as fast as he could and jumped into another hall one deck down.

An alarm started to wail.

Mercer hoped the commotion would make them postpone their experiment until the threat had been assessed and neutralized — but at the moment he wasn’t even sure where it was being conducted. The hallway in which he now stood was more utilitarian than the one upstairs. Not designed as living or recreational space for the crew, the hall was a steel tube with a metal-grate floor that looked down over some machinery. It was sweltering. Steam hissed through a relief valve somewhere. To Mercer it felt like he was in some mid-twentieth-century factory.

He took a second to swap magazines, even though the first one was only half used up. Then he passed through the veil of steam. A shadow moved at the limit of Mercer’s vision, and he fired a snap shot. Ducking and then peering back, he saw he’d holed a plastic sign hanging on a string from some overhead piping.

But that mistake attracted the attention of one of his pursuers, who’d taken an alternate route to this deck. Lead filled the air, and Mercer dove flat behind an unused generator. He slid across the hot deck, dropped down an open section of grating to a subdeck below, and doubled back to a spot below where the gunman stood. Mercer raised his pistol so the barrel was between the grating slats and fired twice. One bullet entered the man’s thigh, tearing through the femoral artery so that a dark pulse of blood erupted out of the exit wound. The other bullet went straight up through his groin, emasculating him before ripping into his gut and eventually pulping his heart.

Mercer had to jump sideways to avoid the rivulets of blood that dropped through the floor grating.

“Sept minutes.”

Mercer swore. They weren’t stopping the test.

He climbed back up and out of the machinery space and saw a figure farther down a dim hallway. The figure ducked around the corner. The steel passageway curved as it wrapped around the enormous structural pedestal supporting the main receiver dish that dominated the Zhukovsky’s stern.

Mercer aimed at the concave wall and triggered off four quick shots. One of the heavy slugs gouged into the steel bulkhead, but the other three ricocheted around the corner and kept going until they hit something. Mercer could hear the slap of one bullet striking flesh.

He ran after his shots and saw one guard lying on the deck and another farther down the passage. That guy was running away but he was still armed, and Mercer wasn’t in a forgiving mood. A single shot caused the guard’s back to arch at an almost impossible angle, and he fell flat.

Mercer flicked his attention to the first guy he’d hit. He, too, was facedown, with a bullet wound to the back of his thigh. Rather than reach down to turn him, he kicked at the man’s hip with everything he had. The guard had been expecting a cautious flip and had his pistol ready to come around when he was rolled onto his back. The kick caught him by surprise, exposing the weapon before he could shoot at Mercer. Instead, Mercer fired one quick shot that put him down.

Mercer took off running. Now that he had his bearings once again he knew how to reach the control center. He passed several open rooms where men in lab coats or crewman’s overalls loitered in the doorways, looking confused about the continuing alarm bells. Mercer shouted in French that they must remain at their posts, pretending to be one of the guards for their benefit. No one challenged him.

“Cinq minutes.”

He ran around a corner and almost got cut in half by Booker with the Kriss.

“Shit, man. Don’t scare me,” Sykes whispered.

“I’m the one who needs to change his shorts now, Book. What’s going on? We’ve got five minutes.”

“Other side of this door is the control room,” Booker said. “They got it closed up just as I got here. I managed to get a few rounds in before they locked me out. We need to find another way.”

“There isn’t time.”

Mercer looked around the antechamber. It was a dead end. He checked the walls, the floor, the ceiling…

He took just a moment to consolidate his two half-empty magazines before turning to Booker. “Give me a hand.” Mercer pointed to a large ventilation grille embedded in the ceiling.

Sykes shouldered his weapon and made a stirrup with his hands. Mercer stepped into it and was nearly crushed against the roof when Booker lifted.

“Easy!”

“Sorry.”

Mercer pulled off the large grille, pulled his sidearm, and wriggled up and into the duct. It was filthy and, he assumed, laced with Legionnaires’ disease and God knew what else, but it passed through the bulkhead separating them from the control room.

The thin metal buckled and popped with even the slightest movement, so all Mercer could hope was that the sound was hidden by the klaxon’s shrill cry. There was light in the floor of the duct just ten feet ahead, which meant there was another vent. He slithered to it and tried to peer down, but the louvers were angled so he couldn’t see anything but the control room’s wall directly beneath him.

“Trois minutes.”

Mercer was going to have to do this blind, and there was no point in waiting. He hammered at the vent with the heel of his hand, and when it popped free he dove through it headfirst, widening the stance of his legs so his outer thighs caught on the duct’s sharp edge and stopped him from falling all the way to the floor.

He hung upside down from the ceiling, supporting himself with his knees, and must have looked like a half-formed moth emerging from its chrysalis. His inverted position meant his head was beginning to fill with blood and in seconds his vision would dim.

The control room on the old Soviet vessel was vast, with banks of computer stations designed for a time when the machines were the size of shipping containers. And it was tall. Mercer was suspended at least twelve feet from the sunken floor. One wall was dominated by massive display screens with the continents shown as a Mercator projection. These would have traced the paths of the Soviet space shuttles. Another wall was mostly a large glass partition. There were only a handful of people there, most in lab coats. They were already on alert because of the alarms and the reports of gunfire, although someone had had the sense to mute the klaxon in this space. As a group they startled at the bang of the metal vent grille hitting the deck, and they were all turning to see what had fallen.

The first to spot Mercer was the man Mercer feared the most.

It was the South African, and he moved as fast as a mamba from his native land. His weapon was already in hand even as he began dropping into a kneeling position that would give him the best stability for an overhead shot.

Somehow Mercer knew he was going to take a knee, and he adjusted his aim to lead his target as he swung the barrel of the .45.

The mercenary’s gun was just a few arc seconds from zeroing in on Mercer when Mercer fired. His first shot missed by a millimeter and he fired again. Dead on center, and the South African was punched back by the .45 slug.

Mercer curled his torso up, grasped the edge of the vent with his fingers, and flipped his legs out. He dropped from the duct and landed squarely on the floor below, absorbing the shock in the long muscles of his thighs and calves. The scientists and techs moved back in a herd reflex, eyes wide with fear. Moments ago they felt secure in their fortress with an armed man to look out for them; now they were terrified. Mercer swept the gun so he covered them, and they all moved back until each was pressed against a workstation.

Mercer kicked aside the unmoving mercenary’s pistol. He saw that he’d hit the man in the narrow spot just below his rib cage. The angle meant the heavy slug had torn through his intestines. It was a killing shot, only the man wasn’t yet dead. It could take a long time to die from being gut-shot. He had one crimson hand pressed to the wound, but more blood was oozing out from under him where the grisly exit wound leached out his life. He looked up now at Mercer, and a sickly smile spread across his scarred visage.

“Can’t even finish me off proper, eh? Going to make me die slow so you can watch.”

“Not going to watch at all,” Mercer said, thinking about Abe.

Mercer moved to the sealed door and opened the latch. Booker came in with the Kriss high and tight. He took in the tactical scene in an instant and quickly moved to keep the scientists covered.

“Who is in charge here?” Mercer shouted. No one spoke, so Mercer fired a round into the largest display screen. The sharp blast of the pistol’s discharge was enough to loosen tongues.

A middle-aged man in a lab coat stuck a tentative hand in the air.

“You’re not in the bloody classroom. Put your hand down and tell me how to stop this experiment before it’s too late.”

“Professor Jean-Robert Fortescue is the project leader,” the man said, his voice shaking. He pointed to the large glass window on the far side of the room. “He’s in there. That’s where the crystals are rigged to the antenna relays. This is just the monitoring room.”

Mercer saw there was a thick door, like that of a bank vault, separating the two spaces. He peered through the massive slab of glass. Beyond was a bright space nearly as large as the control room with towering machines straight out of a mad scientist’s fervid imagination. They were sleek and high tech, their function completely unknowable. He imagined that somewhere in the tangle of power cords as thick as trash barrels, and featureless metal boxes wreathed in frigid clouds of super-cooling gas to keep them from overheating, were the fifty pounds of stones Amelia Earhart had lost her life trying to return to America.

Mercer couldn’t begin to guess how to stop the experiment once it came online. He only knew from Jason that once energy from the ship’s atomic power plant was flooded through the crystals and into space, the planet’s magnetic fields could show the effects within moments.

There were a couple of people in the room. Mercer guessed that the tall and balding man with a smug look on his face had to be Fortescue. Booker tried the vault handle and shook his head at Mercer.

“Can you communicate with them from here?” Mercer asked the tech.

“Yes.” The man pointed to an updated workstation with a modern headset.

Mercer strode over. The mousy scientist backed off, his eyes darting to Book, who stood with his wicked-looking weapon at the ready. Mercer slipped the headset over his ears and adjusted the tiny microphone. “Fortescue, you need to listen to me.”

Beyond the glass, the professor slipped on his own headset. “I believe I know who you are. Roland warned me a while back about someone interfering with our plans, but poor Niklaas there said you were abandoned on a desert isle just a day ago.”

Mercer recognized the voice from the PA countdown. “Please, you have to stop what you’re doing immediately.”

“Why would I do that?”

Mercer knew there was no time for discussion. “Listen to me. Whatever calculations you made are wrong. You ramp up that reactor, and there’s a good chance you will severely damage the earth’s magnetic field.”

“I do not think so.”

Mercer ground his teeth, thinking momentarily about Abe Jacobs and this long nightmare that had started back in the mine in Minnesota. “Okay, asshole, how about I start killing your team out here one by one if you don’t shut this down now?”

A momentary silence greeted Mercer. The Frenchman gave a shrug and said, “I do not know what it is you think we are doing here, monsieur, but the power output will be negligible. The effect will be tiny, though cumulative over many months. The field will not be harmed — slightly fewer clouds will form in this region, and the earth will get a degree or two warmer.”

Mercer wasn’t sure what the man was talking about. Jason was convinced this was an experiment to somehow use the earth’s magnetic field to reduce the amount of warming, given the amount of carbon dioxide that had been released into the atmosphere.

“You’re trying to make it warmer?”

“Oui.”

Mercer and Book exchanged puzzled glances.

Over the PA system, Fortescue said, “Zero.”

A palpable hum grew in the distance, nothing deafening, nothing really more than a background sound. Mercer had expected a torrent of power from the reactor to funnel through whatever apparatus they’d devised for the crystals, or to make a commanding high-tech tone while blinding light shot to the heavens from the main antenna dish. The vapor from the cooling system didn’t even show the tiniest perturbation.

Monitors hooked to the ship-wide CCTV system showed that nothing at all appeared to be happening.

“You see, monsieur,” Fortescue said condescendingly over the headset. “My machine and my calculations are flawless. Once I demonstrate I can warm the surface of the planet, I will then be able to cool it once again.”

“Mercer…” Book was pointing at another desk-mounted monitor. “Check it out.”

The camera showed the main satellite dish, which looked just as it had a few moments earlier. That’s not what had caught Booker’s attention. Above the ship, the night sky, which had been filled with stars, was now darkening with clouds that pulsed with lightning. As they watched, they realized the clouds were moving — spinning slowly, but accelerating visibly like a cyclonic eye with the Zhukovsky at its center.

Sykes added unnecessarily, “That can’t be good.”

Mercer shouted through the headset at the French scientist. “Look at your own cameras — you’re causing an atmospheric disturbance that looks like it’s building. Shut it down, Fortescue. Shut it all down!”

Mercer singled out the man who’d spoken earlier. “Can you scram the reactor?”

“Not from here. And the reactor room is better sealed than here. You cannot get in unless Dr. Fortescue lets you.”

“Book?”

Sykes swung the Kriss toward the window and moved as close as he dared. He fired as rapidly as the gun would cycle, keeping his shots to such a tight group that each divot in the thick glass overlapped its neighbor. He mechanically switched out the magazine once it was depleted and kept firing until the weapon ran dry again. Glass dust and powder blew back from the impacts, but the heavy .45-caliber bullets gouged only a fraction of the way through the armored window. It would take high explosives to get into the next room, something they didn’t have — or have the time to improvise.

Fortescue had ducked for cover behind a pair of computer blade servers at the first violent blasts, but soon righted himself when he realized the window wasn’t going to shatter. He wasn’t brave enough to move closer to the dinner-plate-size spot where the rounds pummeled the glass, though a contemptuous smirk crossed his lips at the bullets’ impotence.

Mercer checked the monitor again. The storm looked like it was growing exponentially, and a hellish blue-green corona was forming like a halo thousands of feet above the ship. The light was otherworldly. Soon, tendrils of energy were arcing out from it on north-south vectors as they followed the planet’s magnetic lines.

“Look, for Christ’s sake!” he shouted at the Frenchman.

Fortescue seemed less sure of himself but said with some defiance, “That is nothing but a quick rebalance. The storm will blow itself out quickly.”

Mercer didn’t know how much time he had. Jason had been unsure of the effects, but he knew it would be minutes, not hours. The storm raging around the ship continued to grow in ferocity, while at its center the invisible streams of energy were being beamed up from the Admiral Zhukovsky’s main antenna. Mercer wasn’t the type to surrender to panic. He was logical, methodical, and generally found a solution to any problem, but at that moment he was completely blank. He stared in horror as the sky became a dome of tortured clouds and polarized ions.

He scanned the nearest workstations. Much of the original equipment was still in place, old analog switches and dials labeled with indecipherable Cyrillic letters. The newer stuff was secured onto the workstations rather than embedded into them, and was labeled in French. He ignored all the old stuff. That would do him no good. Mercer thought about finding cover, but no place would afford protection, not during a pole shift.

And that’s when it hit him.

Protection.

The stones had to be protected to prevent them from attracting lightning, and with the monster storm surging overhead, the ship should have been attracting strike after strike. The machines beyond the glass barrier appeared fragile. They were delicate electronics, not industrial shielding. The room, too, didn’t appear to have any kind of system to counter the effect, and suddenly Mercer understood the wires welded to the hull and strung up to the antenna. They had encased the entire ship in a countermagnetic field, almost like they were degaussing the hull to prevent a static buildup. Unlike Abe Jacobs’s copper box or the handful of brass bullets Mercer had cadged together, this was an active Faraday cage — like system protecting an entire ocean-liner-size ship.

He scanned the workstations again and found exactly what he’d expected. One was dedicated to monitoring the ship’s electromagnetic shielding. He moused open the dormant computer monitor, and when it came to life he quickly found an override to shut off the protective layer of shielding.

“What are you doing?” Fortescue asked from behind the glass.

Mercer ignored him by yanking off his headset and tossing it on the console. He said to Booker. “How are we on time?”

Sykes checked his watch. “We’re still a few minutes early for the Jet Ski’s alarm, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Discretion is the better part of valor,” he said to Booker. He then turned to the technicians and scientists and shouted, “Everyone get off this ship as fast as you can. Tell the rest of the crew. They must evacuate now! All your lives are in danger.”

The storm had worsened, now an angry spinning gyre that was filling the heavens from horizon to horizon, seething with the unimaginable force of a magnetic field gone awry.

Mercer double-clicked an icon on the computer to depower the shield. When he saw the status bar change to “stand-by,” he raised his pistol and put three rounds through the computer wired under the table that controlled the system.

Fortescue pounded on the glass in rage when he realized what Mercer had deduced and then destroyed. The vessel was now vulnerable to lightning strikes, and the most powerful thunderstorm in the planet’s history was raging overhead.

“Let’s go…now,” Mercer said to Sykes, and started running for the exit.

“No!” Fortescue screamed. The French scientist began working the lock to gain access to the control room in the vain hope of somehow reestablishing the protective shield, but it was a useless gesture. The computer was ruined, and he had no idea how long it would take to jury-rig a backup.

Mercer turned to follow Book, and the headlong rush out of the control room. A hand grabbed his ankle. He’d forgotten about the South African, Niklaas.

“I just want you to understand something…” he gurgled, blood and saliva on his lips. “All those years ago in Africa, we were sent out to look for some kidnapped missionaries. It was a rescue mission. When my men saw your white faces, they believed you were victims, and they shot at the armed blacks they thought were holding you. It was an accident…call it friendly fire.”

“Call it whatever you want,” Mercer said without mercy as a flood of anger poured out of him. “A good man named Paul died that day…and his death is just as much your fault as the death of a saintly man named Abraham Jacobs, who you killed in the Leister Deep Mine two weeks ago. You’ve made choices, and so have I. Don’t think that scar made you the rotten murderer you are. That happened long before I shot you. I’ll tell you this, I’m going to sleep easier tonight knowing that you’re dead, and Abe and Paul and Roni Butler and God knows how many others have been avenged.”

Mercer began to turn away, but he pivoted back toward the South African. “I’ll give you a shot at some redemption you don’t deserve,” he offered.

“What’s that?” the South African choked, his eyes rolling in his head.

“Give me the name of the man who paid for all this.”

The mercenary grinned at Mercer and started coughing. He struggled to get words out, until he finally convulsed and went still.

Mercer stared down at him, then turned and jogged over to join Booker outside the control room doorway. That was the moment the first searing fork of lightning struck the ship. The blast of electricity overwhelmed the power stream that pulsed up through Fortescue’s apparatus, and the relays exploded at the onslaught. Drawn to the heart of the equipment where the dun-colored crystals lay, the lightning bolt shot through the wiring in an instantaneous flash that burned everything in a blinding white flash. When it subsided, Professor Fortescue was just a shadow outline of carbon dust left on the glass.

Side by side, Sykes and Mercer ran through the ship, climbing where they found stairways. The handful of people Mercer had warned were now scattered, trying to get others to listen to them about the danger. It appeared none of the crew were listening. No seaman would dare abandon ship into such a tempest, and the scientists couldn’t convince them the real danger was still to come.

Mercer and Book burst out on deck and saw they were on the opposite side of the ship from where they’d abandoned the Jet Ski. There were no others outside, no one prepping the lifeboats to abandon ship, no one even standing in life jackets. And if Mercer and Book hadn’t had an inkling of what was coming, they would have remained within the protection of the ship’s superstructure, too — because far above the vessel a vortex was forming, a miles-wide toroid of clouds that was whipping up to hurricane strength. Lightning arced from side to side like the ethereal net inside a dreamcatcher. What made the effect even more unearthly was that the clouds were so high that the winds didn’t so much as riffle the ocean’s surface.

Down on the ship it was a calm, tranquil night…while overhead the sky looked like a fissure had been opened up to the depths of hades.

They wasted no more than a few seconds in awe of the atmospheric disturbance before taking off running. They had to round the aft section of the superstructure, dashing in a narrow space between the accommodation block and the main antenna pedestal. The air there was supercharged with so much static Mercer’s hair went on end.

They reached the starboard side. They couldn’t see the Jet Ski at first glance, but at this point it didn’t matter. Mercer and Book vaulted the rail, plummeting twenty feet and striking the water. They surfaced at the exact same time and started swimming away from the doomed ship. High above, the maelstrom was intensifying. Lightning was growing stronger, and its booms of exploded air were starting to reverberate across the ocean’s vastness.

Their only consideration was gaining distance, so they swam hard. For being so muscle-bound, Book moved like an otter and was soon outpacing Mercer stroke for stroke. Ahead and about two hundred yards to their left, a light began to flash in a dazzling display of colors, while below the storm’s rumble, “Stars and Stripes Forever” began to play. Their alarm had finally gone off.

Book reached the Jet Ski first and had it started even before Mercer arrived. They positioned themselves as they had before, and this time they opened the throttle to the max. Mercer kept looking back. The magnetic storm clouds were now so saturated with electricity they glowed an eerie green, while forks of lightning kept probing out from the doughnut-shaped anomaly. A few smaller bolts brushed part of the ship, their arcs so blindingly white that even several miles away they were painful to look at. He felt certain the storm was building to an electric potential many times that first strike.

In astonishment, Mercer watched as the toroid suddenly puffed out, as though it were taking a breath, an instant before it unleashed a barrage of lightning many times thicker than anything he’d ever seen. It was as if every lightning strike hitting the earth at that moment had concentrated above the Nikolay Zhukovsky.

The massive discharge struck the ship like a fist from above. For a blinding instant, Mercer could actually see the deluge of power ramming down through the main antenna, and then it came blasting back out of the hull in a searing white ball of plasma that tore plate from frame. The entire ship came apart like an exploding grenade.

Mercer had to look away, his vision marred by the afterglow of such an intense display. Moments later, they were struck by the heat of the blast, a hot ozone-laced wind that filled their lungs and made them cough.

The atomic-bomb-style dome of light finally faded, and when Mercer looked back again there was no evidence that anything extraordinary had happened. The clouds had been blown away, and the night sky shone clear again.

“Jesus,” Book said when he, too, looked behind them. He throttled down the Jet Ski to idle.

“To paraphrase an old TV commercial that was more prophetic than it knew: ‘It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.’ ”