The Einstein Papers (41 page)

Carl Vickerson had spent his life in Iowa, first as a farmer, later as the owner of a feed store. His World War II service in the Army Air Corps took him the farthest he had ever gotten from home. The Vickersons were in Arizona now for a vacation and to attend a reunion of the surviving members of Carl’s World War II squadron. Part of the reunion was a guided tour of the plane graveyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

Now the tour was being cut short by unknown events half a world away.

Carl and Clara didn’t worry much about the shortened tour. They were tired from all the excitement of the trip and seeing Carl’s old friends. By the time the tour bus left the base and was on the blacktop leading back to Tucson, the two of them were asleep, their heads resting together, Carl’s arm across his wife’s shoulders.

Seconds later, the plane carrying Li Choi landed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

Chutetski glanced across the round Chinese rescue raft, then out the side opening in the tent top to the water beyond. Oakes was speaking into a secure satellite phone, and the part Chutetski could hear was not reassuring.

“Roger that,” Oakes said as he cut the connection.

Turning to the SEAL team in the raft, Oakes smiled. “Start preparing, men. We are about to capture a Chinese submarine.”

Chutetski stared at Oakes. “What could possibly happen next!”

“Don’t worry, Chutes,” Oakes said. “We’ll have some help.”

Inside the command center set up in a hangar at Davis-Monthan, Taft wiped his brow on his sleeve. The next to the last day of September 1999 was blistering hot in southern Arizona. The air conditioning inside the hangar building was working overtime. The stitches in Taft’s shoulder itched, and he was reaching inside the sling to scratch them as Martinez walked toward his desk.

“Choi tells me they have finished the installation. He had the air force hook directly into a high-power transmission line, so we have plenty of juice when we need it,” Martinez said.

“Good,” Taft said, “our end is handled.”

“Exactly,” Martinez said wearily.

“It’s hard to believe these planes are going to war again. Some of them were built before I was born,” Taft said.

“From mothballs and parts planes to smack dab in the middle of the Taiwan Strait,” Martinez said quietly. “Isn’t technology amazing?”

Carl Vickerson sat on the edge of the bed in the hotel room in Tucson. He flicked through the television channels with the remote control. Landing on CNN, he watched the broadcast with interest.

“Hey, Clara,” he yelled toward the bathroom, where Clara had gone as soon as they entered the room.

“Yes, dear,” Clara said through the closed door.

“CNN is reporting that the navy has sent ships into the sea between Taiwan and China. They’re calling it ‘Showdown in the Strait.’”

“That’s nice, dear,” Clara noted.

“It doesn’t sound so nice to me,” Carl muttered.

“What, dear?’ Clara asked through the door.

“Nothing, honey,” Carl said.

But it was far from nothing.

The water near the rescue raft carrying the navy SEALs began to boil like a pot of water left too long on a stove. “Here they come!” Oakes shouted, peering through the canvas. “I hope your Chinese is as good as you claim, Chutes.”

Chutetski glanced at his commander. “It’s quite good, sir,” he said easily, “as long as the crew speaks Mandarin Chinese. Otherwise, of course, we’re screwed.”

The conning tower of the Chinese sub broke the surface of the water, and almost instantly the hatch in the conning tower popped open.

In the city-class nuclear attack submarine Phoenix, Commander Eric Devers glanced to his helmsman. “Blow the tanks.”

Oakes paddled the raft a few feet closer to the submarine then motioned to Chutetski, who shouted across the water.

At just that instant, below the raft in the water, Commander Steve Thompson of the ballistic missile submarine John Paul Jones said to his sonar man, “Ping them.”

In position just behind and in back of the Chinese submarine at a depth of seventy feet, the John Paul Jones sounded its presence just as the conning tower of the Phoenix broke the surface of the water.

“We are United States Navy SEAL Team 16,” Chutes shouted in Mandarin. “You are surrounded on both sides by United States Navy nuclear attack submarines. Assemble your crew on the deck. We are taking possession of your vessel.”

The Chinese submarine commander noticed the Phoenix breaching. At that instant he received word by intercom of the detection of the John Paul Jones on sonar.

Glancing around for a second, he issued an order to hoist a white flag.

Forty minutes later the Chinese submarine was fully secured. After smashing the radios with their rifle butts Oakes’s SEAL team fanned out in pairs, holding the crew of the Chinese submarine hostage until an American team could be flown from Florida to drive it to port.

Just before midnight, Sun Tao breathed deeply the diesel fumes that hung low over the water in the port at Xiaman. The Chinese ships that would take part in the assault bristled with weapons. They sat with their engines running, awaiting orders to cast off. They were greyhounds in the gate, and the start of the race was only minutes away.

At exactly midnight of October 1, 1999, the mainland Chinese flotilla steamed from port and started across the Strait of Taiwan. There were over sixty vessels in the assault group and they ran the gamut from destroyers to small attack crafts.

Just before 5 P.M. on September 30, on the other side of the international dateline from China, Taft spoke into a portable radio.

“Are the roads shut off?”

“The roads are secure,” the ranking army security officer replied.

“Has all air traffic been halted?”

“For the next thirty minutes, sir,” the officer answered. “However, at this time in the afternoon there’s not a lot of air traffic anyway.”

Taft looked out the window of the air traffic control tower. A series of power cables leading directly from the main power grid were attached to the planes like rows of Christmas lights. Once inside the planes, the electrical power lines were hooked to cyclotrons the Air Force had hastily scavenged from storage racks and test centers worldwide. Choi had personally supervised the installation in each of the planes and had reported to Taft less than an hour ago that he was pleased with the results.

All Taft could do now was wait.

Taft and Martinez had been ordered to take every possible step to ensure that this test of the Unified Field Theory was not observed by civilians. First, they had to clear the base. That had proved to be easier than first imagined. Arizona was currently in the throes of an Indian summer, and with the September sun beating down, the interior temperature of the mothballed aircraft at Davis-Monthan was over 100 degrees. The exterior metal that formed the skin of the aircraft was hotter still.

Then there was the problem of observation from nearby. Luckily the airplane graveyard at Davis-Monthan was far enough from developed areas and people with their prying eyes. Taft had also asked the Air Force to assign roving groups of security men in Humvees to search the nearby hills for the random hiker or four-wheel-driver.

Taft thought they could probably pull off the disappearing act without too much trouble. His primary concern now was making sure the test would work. From his control tower he scanned the area with binoculars one last time.

“Well, old buddy,” he said to Martinez as he set the binoculars back on a table and nodded at the airman working in the tower, “it’s about time we go see if this crazy idea works.”

They took the elevator from the top of the tower to ground level, where a truck was waiting to drive them to the control center hangar to wait out the last few minutes.

On the deck of the Taiwanese naval cruiser Lotung a thick fall rain was falling. Scaramelli wiped the face of his watch. He glanced from the bridge of the cruiser to the deck below. Then he raised a pair of night-vision binoculars to his eyes and watched as a lone plane flew west. Benson touched his shoulder.

“Don’t worry, Jeff,” he said, “that plane is loaded with enough explosive power to blow a hundred-foot section out of the cable.”

“My problem is that I won’t know exactly where the electricity enters the water,” Scaramelli said. “I would have felt more comfortable if a submersible could have set the charges in place.”

“Me too,” Benson said, “but there simply wasn’t time.”

“It will make it harder,” the scientist in Scaramelli said, “for me to accurately measure this test, not knowing the precise area of the ocean that is electrified.”

“Later, when the cable is repaired they can measure the exact spot where it was cut,” Benson said.

The thought seemed to brighten up Scaramelli’s mood considerably. “Are they ready at Davis-Monthan?”

“Yes,” Benson replied.

Just then, in the far distance, the U.S. Air Force B-52 dropped the load of mixed ordnance into the ocean. The combination of bombs traveled down to the ocean floor, then exploded. The concussion from the blast sent a geyser of water several hundred feet into the air and could be felt the length of Lotung, and the cruiser rocked back and forth as the waves pounded her hull.

“What about at the power transmission station on Taiwan?” Scaramelli said a bit too loud because his ears were ringing.

“Yes, we just have to tell them when,” Benson said, popping his ears to clear them.

Scaramelli’s idea of cutting the cable had been harder to sell to the Taiwanese than first imagined. The only way to generate a large enough electrical field to attract the scrambled molecules of nearly a hundred aging aircraft from the ionosphere to the ocean’s surface was to divert most of the electricity that powered Taiwan into a trans-Pacific communications cable that stretched from Taiwan to mainland China.

To do that, National Security Advisor Lakeland had to beg and cajole the Taiwanese president. Once Taiwan’s power was diverted, she’d be a sitting duck, though most of the military installations had backup generators that would supply electricity to essential equipment, and they could probably continue to operate and perform their missions.

If the power diversion blew the main transmission line and the power could not be quickly restored, it would be the ordinary citizens who would suffer the most. The fans in the public air-raid shelters wouldn’t work. If fires broke out, they would be impossible to fight without the electrical pumps used to move die water. Those unfortunate people in Taiwanese hospitals-and there were tens of thousands of them-would be faced with barbaric conditions that might prove life-threatening. Traffic lights would cease to work, food in refrigerators would soon spoil, and darkness would rein.

If the main power grid exploded from the surge of power being diverted into the ocean, or if the current flowed back along the cable and somehow got into Taiwan’s electrical infrastructure, the country would be plunged back into the Stone Age just as the numerically superior forces from mainland China attacked.

Only a firm assurance by Lakeland to Taiwan’s president that the American fleet was only days away and would enter the fight brought the needed permission.

It was just past five in the afternoon Arizona time when Taft spoke into his cellular telephone.

“It’s time, Li,” he said to Choi, who stood before a hastily assembled control panel. Without a word he twisted a knob and sent electricity surging to the cyclotrons.

Taft walked toward the open hangar door and glanced toward the graveyard of airplanes in the far distance. Like a mirage over a desert oasis the air surrounding the airplanes began to shimmer. A yellow-edged aura began forming in the air ten feet or so over the tops of the aircraft.

And then, all at once, the planes blinked once like a light switch had been thrown on and then they disappeared.

“Coming your way,” Taft said quietly to Benson.

“Our airborne radar reports the Chinese flotilla will be able to detect us in the next few minutes,” the Taiwanese admiral in command of the Lotung said to Benson.

“Power to the cable,” Benson shouted.

Scaramelli looked through his binoculars across the water. Far in the distance he could just make out a blinking red light he had ordered attached to one of the nearly thirty metal barges that had been loaded with scrap iron and then magnetized at the docks in Kaohsiung. When that was completed, the barges had been towed into place in the Taiwan Strait and anchored. The thick copper cables that hung from the sides of the barges into the water were designed to act like lightning rods and attract the current from the cable. The electricity would increase the barges’ magnetism and attract the molecules of the plane from the ionosphere.

At least that was the plan.

And then to the west, directly in the path of the Chinese flotilla, the night sky began to lighten and roil with a massive thunderstorm.

“Here comes the storm,” Scaramelli shouted to Benson over the increasing noise.

Benson watched through infrared binoculars as a cloud of fog grew on the surface of the Taiwan Strait several miles away. A stiff wind arose, forming whitecaps on the water and blowing the fog toward mainland China. A roiling wall of clouds began to form. The clouds began to emit light from deep inside, yellow and orange with peach and red in the center. The outer edges turned deep purple, then black as the cloud expanded at an alarming rate. From the top of the clouds random bolts of lightning streaked downward, then all at once they linked and formed a wall of electrical energy. A loud clap akin to a gigantic sonic boom spread in all directions from the center of the cloud.

Then a hail of aircraft parts along with misshapen blobs of molten metal rained down from the skies. Parts of wings and propellers sliced through the air like a cleaver to a butcher’s block. Suspended in the windstorm, they spun ever faster as the storm began to track west.

Benson managed to shield himself behind a deck gun before the boom reached the frigate and lost only his hat in the gust of wind that rocked the massive missile ship like a giant hand. The commander of the Taiwanese navy was not so lucky. Blown off his feet, he smashed his head against the deck. When the first blast abated he had to be carried to the infirmary with a mild concussion. A tornado was created in the center of the cloud. Unlike those naturally formed, which have a tendency to wander back and forth like a dog’s wagging tail, this one remained centered. Less than a minute later the decks of the ships of the Taiwanese navy were covered in a rain of fish and other sea life. And still the storm grew stronger.