Chasing The Dawn (Luke Temple - Book 2) (Luke Temple Series) (36 page)

Luke shook his head.

“At CERN they have an intricate and giant machine called the Super Proton Synchrotron. It is seven kilometres in circumference. In simple terms, it produces and fires beams of protons into what is called a graphite target. From this impact a new range of particles appear called pions and kaons, which are fed into a system of two magnetic lenses that focus the beams through the earth toward Gran Sasso. The idea being that the rock beyond stops all particles except neutrinos …”

“The rock?”

“Yes, neutrinos can travel through solid rock whereas other particles can’t. Then it was OPERA’s role to measure the point of impact at the facility to gauge the speed of the particle.”

Luke nodded.

“This design here has scarily similar mechanisms. It has the magnetic lenses, but no graphite target. It doesn’t make sense … there is more that we can’t see. But everything points to this being a nuclear detonation site. I have seen them and worked on them.” She gingerly caught Luke’s eye. “I do not apologise for my country trying to secure the same protection that you have.”

Luke jumped in. “Help me piece the puzzle together. The experiment that Brun and Vittorio were working on at OPERA was to test the speed of neutrinos, which they did …”

Chung Su nodded.

“Then, according to Brun’s claims, they took this further and actually took this … particle … and made it so it can now interact … meaning it can now be used.”

“Well, on a very, very basic level, yes. We know now that neutrinos do have mass; they are subject to laws of time. Neutrinos come in what we scientists call three different flavours, muon, tau and electron. Some years ago it was proven that these neutrinos can oscillate between types.”

“You mean they can swap around?” Luke asked.

“Sort of. They actually change into each other, meaning a muon can become an electron, a tau can become a muon and so on. This is very important. They do this over
time,
and as stated by Albert Einstein, if something does not have mass it travels at the speed of light, which in turn renders time a non-entity.’

Luke let out a sigh, his confusion was growing.

“So the fact that these particles alter over time must mean they have a
concept
of time …”

“They have to have a mass?” Luke ventured.

“Exactly!” Chung Su smiled like a teacher at a slow pupil.

“But Brun said they had clocked the particle moving faster than the speed of light?”

Chung Su frowned. “I know. This is why it changes everything. This is why my country has put so much into replicating the experiment. It alters the laws of physics as we know them. Vittorio had already moved past this … into harnessing the neutrino in some way.” It still pained her that she could not understand how.

Luke’s mind went back to what Brun had said at his house
. There are a hundred billion neutrinos passing through your hand every second.
“So this blueprint we have here is for what? What would you do with a nuclear detonation site and the other instruments?” Luke rested his head in his hands, trying to process the information.

“I cannot be completely certain …” Chung Su’s voice wobbled.

“But if you had to guess?”

“This is how Vittorio was processing neutrinos for practical use …” The words sounded absurd.

Luke pressed his eyes shut. “Walk me through it …”

“I don’t know …” Chung Su could feel the frustration building. She was a scientist and by nature competitive – her environment pushed her to be – but she couldn’t find the answers.

“Go through it, step by step.” Luke became stern.

“Well, neutrinos are the product of a certain type of radioactive decay. The kind you find in the sun, nuclear reactors … or nuclear explosions. It is no coincidence, they must be letting off nuclear explosions to produce certain particles. I just don’t know what type of nuclear explosion.”

“Type?” Luke figured nuclear explosions were all the same. They certainly had the same outcome, total devastation.

“Yes, there are two different types of nuclear bomb,
fission
and
fusion.
”

A flare went up in Luke’s mind. “Hang on, didn’t Brun mention fission?”

Chung Su had forgotten the professor had mentioned fission. “Yes, he did, you’re right. A nuclear fission bomb is created by firing free-floating neutrons into a radioactive atom, usually uranium-235. This impact then splits the radioactive atom into pieces, including into more neutrons. With more and more free neutrons available, more and more atoms start fissioning. That is where the massive amounts of energy are created, causing the enormous explosions seen in nuclear bombs.” Chung Su knew that the fissioning atoms could double the number of neutrons in a contained environment more than eighty times in one microsecond, causing the device to expand with tremendous force, and also releasing radioactive particles. “But that’s interesting …”

Luke was becoming very uneasy at all the talk of nuclear explosions. “Doesn’t sound interesting to me, just worrying.”

“It’s interesting because nuclear
fusion
is what happens in the sun, not fission. In the sun it is the fusing of hydrogen atoms.” She tucked her hair behind her ear in deep thought. “Why would they use fission?”

“Why wouldn’t they?” Luke was trying to catch up.

“Fission was used in the early atomic bombs, such as the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they were not very efficient. Science soon moved on to testing whether the opposite would work better … fusion. And it did, considerably. It was a far more efficient reaction.”

Luke could sense her mind was working. “Go on … what does it mean?”

Chung Su shook her head. “I can only assume that there must be something in the process of fission …” she furrowed her brow and stared at the phone, “but this is just a piece of the puzzle, the graphite target and the magnetic lenses should not be that close, it’s not the right measuring equipment for what they are trying to achieve. There are bits missing … the equipment I see in this section of the blueprint …” Chung Su stopped mid-sentence, and then disappeared back into the bathroom. Luke followed.

She guided him to the mirror. The lines had started to fade but were still visible. “The magnetic lenses are not being used for newly produced neutrinos, that’s why there is no graphite target. They are being used to capture and focus neutrinos that are being directed there from another area. It would appear almost like reverse engineering.”

“CERN?” Luke asked.

“No, I don’t think so … I think this is linked to the Gran Sasso OPERA experiment. I …” she again stopped, unsure whether to say what she was about to. “I do not think this is based at the Gran Sasso Laboratory …”

Luke stared at the image on the mirror.

Chung Su continued, “The intelligence we were receiving said there was one beam of neutrinos coming in from CERN … this means two things. One: the beam being used for this must be coming from Gran Sasso, redirected to here.” She pointed at the mirror. “Two: if this is in fact what I think it is then the redirection point is a nuclear detonation site … close to Gran Sasso and underground.”

Luke listened intently, attempting to connect the dots.

Chung Su whispered to herself as she looked at the mirror
. Where do you fit in?
She traced the circular lines with her finger.

“Listen to your instinct, you have an idea, I can feel it. Trust it and tell me what you think,” Luke tried to coax her.

“The transition must lie within the heart of the nuclear reaction. These two magnetic phantom lines are to guide neutrinos
towards
the experiment not
away
from it … which means this single phantom magnetic line is to carry something
away
from the experiment … the liquid … so much occurs at the heart of a nuclear explosion, including decay, electromagnetic force … so much.” Her mind whirled and flashed as the thoughts formed. “There is more to this, sections we don’t have, there must be more than this rough blueprint, this would be early work …”

That made sense to Luke; perhaps Vittorio had kept it as a personal memory, a keepsake on the path to what he had achieved.

Chung Su turned to face Luke. “To test this, to actually get this running underground, a huge explosion must be recorded, and I can’t see that it is possible undetected.”

Luke was replaying things, rotating them and fixing them in place like a metaphorical Rubik’s Cube. There was another laboratory? Was that why there was such little activity around the Gran Sasso Institute? If there was another laboratory then Brun must have known about it. Luke trusted Chung Su’s instinct. He knew that the little voice in someone’s head should be trusted. This was her area of expertise.

A huge explosion.
Luke kept replaying Chung Su’s words. Something in them was fighting to be understood. He walked into the bedroom and went over to the window, lifting up the blind. The night was calm, a streetlight let out an orange glow. Peering through his own reflection he could just make out the opaque silhouette of the Gran Sasso mountain range looming in the distance … then it hit him.

“A huge explosion?” he called back into the bathroom.

Chung Su emerged. “Yes, it would have to be a substantial nuclear force, not the largest but at least two kilotons. There is no way such a thing could go unreported.”

Luke walked slowly up to her. “Could such a thing be misinterpreted as an earthquake?”

Chung Su’s brow furrowed. She wasn’t sure where the comment had come from. It sounded absurd, but as her synapses fired she began to see the logic.

“Yes … I suppose so. The seismic activity of an underground nuclear explosion could look very much like an earthquake, especially with the wave-like nature … why?”

“Chung Su, if this set-up was located under L’Aquila would that distance stay in line with your theory on what they were doing?”

After a moment she nodded. “Yes. That is possible …
oh my God …
” The horror struck her all at once.

Luke sat down; the puzzle was starting to take shape. The L’Aquila earthquake had not been an earthquake at all; it had been an experimental nuclear explosion under the earth. “You can detonate a nuclear explosion underground?”

Chung Su nodded. “Of course, if you have the right calculations. They have been testing underground since the 1950s. Some have gone horribly wrong, but it is a far safer way to test than out in the atmosphere. We looked at it ourselves …” she hesitated, then thought there were more important things at hand than national security. “We examined the possibility but calculated that a kiloton-yield bomb needs to be at least ninety metres underground in order for its explosion to be fully contained. Putting that into context the bomb that was detonated in Nagasaki in 1945 was twenty-two kilotons. Ultimately, we found it too costly to build an underground facility.”

“Cost is not an issue here …” Luke said the words under his breath. “This other potential laboratory must be that deep under the ground?”

“I would have thought deeper, but to be clear this blueprint does not give depth, it is not three-dimensional …”

Luke looked at her.

“The technical areas of the laboratory won’t have to be as deep as the explosion site; it may be CERN, Luke, but they don’t have unlimited resources, and the lower you go with your technical readout equipment, such as computers and other things, the more money you have to put into connections and increasing rock stability.”

“Do you believe this is a real-life creation? Not just a design on a piece of paper?” Luke already felt he knew the answer. It explained so much, but he wanted to hear it from her.

“My head is struggling with it, but my heart is telling me yes. Brun said himself they found a way to make it interact with the world around it. The key must be within the process of fission … but be in no doubt that this is not the whole of it … we have only a section.’

Always break things down to the simplest building blocks.
Luke’s Group 9 instructor had given sound advice; in this case the simple fact was that Vittorio and Brun had achieved the seismic shift. The earthquake in L’Aquila also made sense. Luke felt his stomach jump. He connected the Iranians with the disappearance of Vittorio and the death of Brun …
surely that means they know about the other laboratory?
There was a danger growing, and Luke could hear the time ticking away.

“How many earthquakes have been recorded here?” Chung Su suddenly asked.

“I don’t know … only one in recent times, I believe. Why?”

“I have been a scientist all my life, and all the greatest scientists, and Professor Vittorio is one of them, have one thing in common … do you know what that is?”

Luke shook his head.

“An obsession with proof … they don’t make statements until they are sure.”

Luke caught up with her thoughts. “So why not more earthquakes?”

Chung Su nodded. “Test, test and test again.”

Luke ruminated on it, she had a point. Surely they would have tested it more than once,
but maybe not.
“Maybe they did only do the one test,” Luke said. “A test on that scale will obviously cause problems, not to mention the magnitude of destruction. Perhaps there was no way of being able to test over and over.”

Chung Su had not given a thought to the devastation such an experiment had caused in L’Aquilla. She turned sombre. The human connection and the suffering had been completely disregarded by such a great team. “I think the earthquake was an error in judgment, nuclear fission detonations are unpredictable in nature, they underestimated it.”

Luke accepted that could be true. “Let’s say they carried out the one experiment. It worked and the government shrugged it off as an earthquake. I mean the upside to what they could potentially gain from the results could be immense; it would far outweigh any sort of short-term tragedy. But that sort of thing gains attention, right? So they have to wait, bide their time until they test again … then Vittorio disappears and suddenly they can’t do it anymore … and the Iranians closing in scares Brun into telling the scientific glitterati at the gala.”