Revolution (36 page)

There was a long pause on the line.

‘I am immensely displeased with your performance, Harry.’

Harrison Forbes ground his teeth in his jaw for a moment.

‘Oh me, oh my, oh what must I do? To hell with you, Cain. I’m not your damned whipping boy.’

‘You’re done Forbes. I want you out of that office immediately!’

Harrison Forbes slammed the receiver down and stood with his hands on his hips for several long moments as he forced himself to calm down. He looked out of the office windows at his staff, and was about to move around his desk to announce his imminent retirement when he saw on his desk a small business card. He looked down and read the name upon it.

Frank Amonte.

Harrison Forbes picked the card up and looked at it for a long moment, trying to remember who had put it there. A line from his memory offered itself.

‘I have the number of an account in Oklahoma, United States…’

Harrison turned the card over to see the account details written on the reverse side of the card.

Harrison thought to himself for a moment longer and then picked up his phone.

***

Alexandre led Megan across a barren field, the earth rock–hard beneath their feet and flecked with snow that sparkled in the light of the morning sun. Megan could see her own breath billowing in golden clouds in the otherwise silent air. She realised that she could in fact hear nothing else, as though she and the farmer were the only remaining human beings on the planet.

They walked toward a large, dilapidated old barn that stood on the edge of the fields. Megan could see light between the aged boards cladding the frame of the barn as they approached the doors, which stood slightly open. Clearly Alexandre had no concern for thieves in this lonely corner of the mountains.

‘No lock,’ Megan noted as they reached the doors.

Alexandre smiled.

‘If I put a lock on it, someone might suspect that there was something of value inside. There is, of course, but why give the game away?’

The farmer pulled on the heavy door, which bowed slightly under the pressure before creaking open. Alexandre walked inside and Megan followed, detecting the odours of dust and hay, of mud and the faeces of farm animals. The darkness within the barn was deep, sliced through only by shafts of light streaming through the gaps in the cladding.

‘My father built this barn,’ Alexandre said as they walked between towering stacks of hay bales, ‘fifty years ago or more now. He was a skillful man.’

They walked to the rear of the barn to where a pair of ancient tractors stood, one of them half–covered with old tarpaulins, the other with dust. Opposite stood a third tractor, a newer and glossier one that Alexandre gestured toward.

‘That is what you are looking for,’ he said.

Megan stared at the vehicle for a moment.

‘A tractor? Petra Milosovich was working on a tractor?’

‘Not the tractor,’ the farmer smiled. ‘He was working on what’s inside it.’

Megan looked at the vehicle for a moment, and then suddenly she became aware of a faint hum emanating from somewhere beneath the hood of the vehicle. She took a pace closer as Alexandre strolled up to the tractor and removed the safety pins from the hood before opening it.

There, inside, was a large cylindrical device that resembled an engine, but not one that Megan had ever seen before. She could identify two large–bore pistons well enough, and the fact that the engine appeared to be operating. Cables snaked discreetly from one end of the engine, down into the ground. Alexandre saw the direction of Megan’s gaze.

‘My father built a shallow water–feed pipe between the barn and the farmstead’s main water supply, to make watering the animals he kept here easier. We adapted it and ran a power cable from here back to the farm.’

Megan stared at the tractor’s engine for a moment.

‘You get all that power from this? It’s so quiet.’

‘Very. We’d have put it next to the house, but Petra felt that would be too dangerous.’

‘Dangerous? Why? What fuel does it use?’

‘Oh, it’s not the fuel that’s dangerous. Technically, it could run on vegetable oil if you really want it to. No. Petra realised that people would kill to prevent this from ever reaching the rest of the world, which was why we hid it like this, or at least this version of it.’

Megan shook her head in confusion.

‘Why? What’s the big deal?’

Alexandre gestured to a small cylinder, lying long and low across the top of the tractor engine.

‘That cylinder contains a modest amount of helium. I think the last time that I replaced it would have been in the spring, maybe nine months ago.’

Megan was about to speak, but her jaw hung open. Her mind performed a few rapid calculations and she stared at the farmer in amazement. Alexandre smiled as he saw Megan begin to understand, and he spoke softly.

‘The device is called a Sterling Engine. They’ve been around for a couple of hundred years, as it happens, although this is a very modern example. It’s simply a closed–cycle, piston driven heat–exchange engine, much like the engine in your car, except that in a closed–cycle engine like this the working gas remains within the cylinders, whereas in your car it is vented into the atmosphere as an exhaust.’

Megan raised a hand.

‘I didn’t do motor mechanics at school I’m afraid.’

‘Neither did I,’ Alexandre admitted, ‘but Petra told me all that I needed to know to understand what this is and why it is so important. It is all to do with efficiency, and how the methods we use to produce electrical energy to heat our homes and the engines we use to drive our cars are hugely
inefficient
.’

‘And this, Sterling Engine, does it better?’ Megan surmised.

‘Much better,’ Alexandre nodded. ‘Petra was so excited about it. He told me that the average vehicle on the road, powered by the internal combustion engine, can produce a maximum efficiency of just fifteen per cent. That means that of all the power produced, eighty five per cent goes into overcoming friction within the engine or is lost as heat. A Sterling Engine like this, on the other hand, can produce energy with an efficiency of as much as sixty per cent.’

Megan looked at the engine before her, turning quietly over as they spoke like the cogs of her own mind as she considered what Alexandre was telling him.

‘So if you put one of these in a car, it would only need a fraction of the fuel?’

‘Precisely, although the mechanics of it are a bit more complicated. Essentially, the Sterling Engine has fewer moving parts, has no exhaust pollution, needs little maintenance and has a far greater operating life than the conventional internal combustion engine.’

Megan thought again for a moment, glancing around her at the barn.

‘If this got onto the street, it would rapidly reduce the need for oil,’ she said.

‘Cars would not need to use as much fuel,’ Alexandre agreed. ‘They could probably run entirely on bio–fuels, hydrogen cells or even solar power in many countries. Industry, which uses more oil than transport, could follow suit.’

‘I’m starting to get a nasty feeling that I understand what’s been happening here,’ Megan said. ‘What I don’t understand is, if these engines have been around for hundreds of years, how come they’re not already on the market?’

Alexandre moved closer to the engine, pointing out various components as she spoke.

‘These devices are heat–exchange engines. They work because they shift the working fluid or gas within between two different temperature states. They’re classified as an external combustion engine, despite the fact that heat can be supplied by non–combusting sources such as solar and nuclear energy. This one operates through the use of an external heat source and an external heat sink, each maintained within a limited temperature range, and having a sufficiently large temperature difference between them.

‘The problem for years has been that they are not able to produce sufficient power without becoming too large. It’s fine if you want something with a continuous power–output that can be built on a grand scale, like marine engines for instance – ships use these all the time. But a Sterling Engine small enough to fit in a vehicle would not produce sufficient energy to move the vehicle forward. The pressures and temperature differentials would need to be too high, and the materials did not exist to contain them safely.’

‘And that’s where Petra Milosovich came in.’

Alexandre nodded.

‘Petra worked for years in an engineering department within the government, both before and after the democratic revolution. Petra despised the polluting of the world by industry, and spent years pursuing ways in which the Sterling Engine could be improved and made accessible as a means of powering our world without the need for excessive pollution of the environment. Two years ago, he had a breakthrough.’

Alexandre moved away from the tractor and sat on the edge of a hay bale.

‘He came to me when he discovered it. He had developed a ceramic material that had sufficient tensile strength along with a high enough density to efficiently contain a fuel source of helium.’

‘The gas, helium?’ Megan said.

‘Hydrogen is the gas of choice for most of these devices,’ Alexandre explained, ‘but unfortunately the lightest of the gases is also the most combustible and can bleed through solid metal via osmosis, and thus is not considered safe for commercial use. Helium, however, is both abundant, cheap and highly unreactive. Petra realised that if he could contain helium then he was on his way, because if he could condense the gas to sufficient pressure within the engine, then the entire device could itself be made small enough to become viable for general commercial use. He eventually worked out not just how to fit them into cars but into aero–engines as well.’

Megan shook her head in wonder.

‘That would mean that he could probably build them to power houses, like this one,’ she observed. ‘There would be no need for a national grid.’

Alexandre opened his arms in a broad gesture, his features alive with delight.

‘Petra had gone even further than that. He envisaged a time when the temperature difference between the molten rock of the earth’s upper crust, and the cold waters of the oceans could be used as potentially limitless sources of fuel for national energy generation via large banks of industrial scale Sterling Engines, true geo–engineering.’

The farmer’s arms slowly fell again to his sides and his expression fell with them.

‘He went directly to the Mordanian government and applied for world–wide patents; Europe, America, Australia. Everywhere.’

‘What happened?’

‘He was denied the patents repeatedly. He could not understand it. Nobody wanted to hear about his work. It shocked him, left him in dismay. Megan, if only you could have seen how that man’s endless joy at making the discovery of a lifetime was crushed into depression and the collapse of his faith in humanity’s spirit. It destroyed Petra Milosovich long before the secret police got hold of him.’

‘And yet he was working on something near Anterik,’ Megan said. ‘The laboratories that were destroyed.’

‘Yes,’ Alexandre said. ‘Petra would not give in to the government. He resigned his post and began working on a new project with a small team of like–minded scientists who believed that they could produce something highly commercial. They built four of these engines, and all of them were running in vehicles just before the war began.’

Megan guessed the rest.

‘General Rameron must have found out. It must be he who holds connections to the oil businesses around the Caspian Sea. That’s why they were murdered.’

Alexandre stood from his hay bale and shook his head.

‘No, Megan. It was General Rameron who funded Petra’s studies, in defiance of orders from the government.’

Megan stared at Alexandre for what felt like an age as the farmer continued.

‘General Rameron was responsible for letting Petra Milosovich continue working on his Sterling Engines. When the government found out they threatened General Rameron with court–martial. The general refused an order to report to Thessalia. The government sent an armoured force to arrest Rameron and bring him to the city. The Air Force personnel defended their general, and the uprising began.’

Megan swallowed thickly, looking from the concealed tractor engine to the farmer and back again.

‘You’re telling me that General Rameron did not start this war,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘You’re telling me that it could be someone in the government that is working with the oil companies?’

Alexandre shook his head.

‘I’m not telling you anything. All I’m saying is that Petra made a discovery that could have made oil obsolete, General Rameron defended him, and then the country disintegrated into civil war. If you ask me, this war is what the oil companies wanted – access to Mordania’s oil, which meant huge investment in the country, and therefore neither the government nor the oil companies could not afford Petra’s device becoming public knowledge.’

‘So they killed him,’ Megan said in sudden, overwhelming despair. She turned for the barn doors.

‘Where are you going?’ Alexandre asked, getting up to follow her.

‘Sophie and Martin,’ Megan gasped as she broke into a run. ‘They’re in danger.’

***

Martin Sigby watched the television in his room at the Thessalia Hilton, the glow from the screen contrasting with the flickering candles. An image from a United States aircraft carrier in the Black Sea showed waves of American F–18s launching from the ship’s catapults, engines in full afterburner as they climbed into the glowing dawn sky.

‘Is this live feed?’ Robert, Sigby’s cameraman, asked.

Sigby nodded, gesturing to the skies above the carrier. ‘Looks to be,’

‘You should have made your report an hour ago.’

‘To hell with them,’ Sigby muttered as he watched.

The television reporter’s voice carried over the deafening roar of fighter engines as she explained what was happening.