The Einstein Papers (42 page)

Minutes before, the Chinese fleet commander had stared from his command post aboard the largest destroyer in the Chinese navy as a freak storm began to form directly in front of the flotilla. Less than ten seconds after he first noticed the cloud, a fury of wind, rain, and lightning struck the fleet with an intensity he had never witnessed before.

On board the Chinese fast-attack boat Fuzhou the situation was turning from bad to worse. Captain Ling Chow had watched as a cloud of fog enveloped his vessel. Seconds later the steel decks of his forty-foot boat were being pelted by hail the size of tangerines. He watched from the pilothouse as the two crewmen manning the front and rear gun emplacements began to dance as if they were trapped in a swarm of bees. Stupidly, the sailor in the front emplacement sought to remove his battered combat helmet. Chow watched as the man was knocked unconscious by a flurry of hail pounding his bare head. The crewman slumped over his gun, a trickle of blood seeping from his head.

Another crewman dashed to his aid but a moment later reversed himself and began to run toward the safety of the cockpit. He was halfway to the cockpit when a ten-foot-long plate of metal appeared seemingly from out of nowhere. Cutting the crewman in two at the waist, the metal imbedded itself in the gun emplacement, the man’s upper torso skewered on the metal.

Three seconds later Chow watched as a violent gust of wind sucked the lower body of the crewman, still clad in pants and shoes, into the heavens. The wind continued to suck upward until it ripped the upper half of the torso from beneath the slab of metal and flung it against the window of the cockpit.

Chow screamed as the lifeless face pressed against the window was then flung, arms askew, off the ship.

The crewman in the rear emplacement fared better, as he had left his helmet, now dented, firmly attached. His mistake, however, was to look up into the sky. A large hailstone, moving with the velocity of a baseball tossed by a major-league pitcher, smashed him squarely in the nose. Blood spurted forth from the center of his face. A second hailstone hit him in his left eye and he raised his hand to cover the wound. He jammed his feet into the emplacement to avoid being sucked out into space.

And then the tornado struck.

Chow ducked as the windows of the pilothouse were sucked outward. He jammed his leg under a table bolted to the floor and held on tight. The Fuzhou rocked on its end beam to the port side. Thousands of gallons of seawater flooded across the decks, then raced down an open passage toward the lower decks. Chow glanced up just as the body of the forward gunner slammed into the wall of the pilothouse. The tornado lifted him into the air, dragging his unconscious body against a sharp steel edge on the corner of the pilothouse. Chow watched in horror as the man’s chest opened up like a salmon under a filet knife.

And then the crewman, his entrails trailing outside his body, was sucked upward in the tunnel cloud and disappeared from view. Chow swiveled his head and glanced toward his helmsman. The helmsman’s legs were being sucked out the opening where the port window had been only seconds before. Screaming at the top of his lungs for help he clutched the edge of the wheel in an attempt to keep his body from being sucked out the opening.

It was not to be.

The tip of the tornado shifted for a millisecond and he was dropped onto a large shard of broken glass that was still firmly attached to the window frame. His body was severed in half as neatly as if he had been placed under a guillotine.

Chow stared in horror as the tornado sucked the lower half of his torso into the air. In a cruel twist of fate the helmsman had managed to jam the knuckle of his left hand into a space between the wheel and the helm station. The upper half of his body remained in the pilothouse, a grisly reminder of the devastation aboard the Fuzhou.

Chinese Fleet Commander Zang Pochan watched in horror from the pilothouse of the Hainan, the largest destroyer in the Chinese navy, as his crewmen on the deck of the destroyer were decimated. He glanced out the window as part of the wing of an airplane, the engine still attached, a twenty-year-old U.S. Air Force emblem still clearly visible, landed hard on his deck, shaking the pilothouse.

With horror he could see that dozens of communication antennae, ripped from their mountings by the storm, were being flung through the air. Like spears from a long-ago war, they skewered the men on the deck before the tornado lifted them into the heavens.

Zang shouted to his radio operator to alert the other ships in his fleet to abort, but with no antennae to transmit the message it was all for naught.

And then the lightning hit.

It came not as random bolts but as a wall of electrical energy, surging from one end of the ship to the other, plunging the ship into darkness and blowing every fuse on board. The main engines continued to run but the pumps, lights, and all else electric ceased functioning.

And then the Hainan plowed into the Yantai.

At the beginning of the storm, Tsung Chan, captain of the Yantai, had ordered his helmsman to ring the engine room for full stop. They were sitting in the water when the Hainan appeared through the fog and struck them amidships. The lower holds of the Yantai were crammed to full capacity with artillery shells, land mines, and infantry ammunition. As the Yantai rolled over on her back, with timing that would be impossible to duplicate, several bolts of lightning struck the exposed ordnance and ignited a conflagration.

The Yantai sank almost immediately. There were no survivors.

It took the Hainan eighteen minutes to go down. Three hundred of the slightly more than eighteen hundred of the crew were saved.

The U.S. Air Force planes from Anderson Air Force Base on Guam met the Chinese aircraft halfway across the water. Forming a defensive wall, they diverted the Chinese planes from their course. China and the United States began a deadly game of cat and mouse played in the skies. The loser would be the first side to bunk.

In Beijing, the American ambassador to China glanced at his aide, who looked up from his computer and nodded. Then he addressed his Chinese counterpart.

“Two United States Navy nuclear ICBM submarines now in the South China Sea have just completed plotting their target solutions. Their payload delivery point is there,” the ambassador said, pointing out the window at the Forbidden City. “A storm has stopped your ships in the Taiwan Strait, and our air force is in a standoff with yours, as we speak.”

The Chinese ambassador glanced at his aide, who had just returned from the communications room. With a nod, the aide confirmed that all the information just received was correct.

The U.S. ambassador stared across the desk. “Let’s not all die this day,” he said in a cold voice.

“If we withdraw will you guarantee not to attack our retreating troops?” the Chinese ambassador asked.

The American ambassador to China reached for a phone.

“We’re losing it,” Scaramelli shouted.

And then it was quiet.

Scaramelli crept from behind the superstructure. His hair was standing straight in the air from the electrical energy that had been generated. He glanced across the water as the fog began to dissipate. Far away on the horizon he could see the ravaged remains of the once powerful Chinese navy. Collapsing to the deck he glanced into the sky. A ring of black and purple clouds high above was collapsing in on itself as the storm imploded.

And then there was a rainbow.

Forty-eight Hours Later

Taiwan emerged unscathed. Only hours after the storm the main electrical feed leading into the ocean was withdrawn. By midday the power to the primary electrical grid had been restored and the country, although still on a heightened state of military alert, was almost back to normal.

The storm turned west after decimating the Chinese navy. The Taiwanese island of Quemoy, located just miles from the Chinese mainland, was hardest hit. Hurricane-force winds ripped foliage from limbs and downed trees but the Taiwanese military personnel stationed on the island were deep in their bunkers. Only three soldiers lost their lives.

In the Fujian Province of mainland China the cities of Xiamen and Zhangzhou were the hardest hit. Hard-driving rains created a flooding of the river running through Zhangzhou, where mud slides killed thousands. Xiamen was devastated by a tidal wave over twenty feet tall, and most of the buildings nearest the water were washed out to sea. A fierce hailstorm pummeled the city for forty minutes; thousands of Chinese citizens, outside when the storm struck, were either killed or maimed. It was as though the gods had been angered and were showing their ire.

In Beijing, the prime minister sat in his office in the dim light of a foggy morning. His brilliantly conceived plan was in ruins. Rebuilding the navy would take China many years and great sums of money. He now knew his dream of reuniting Taiwan with mainland China would never be realized in his lifetime.

The entire episode had turned into a humiliating failure.

For his role in the failed affair he ordered that Sun Tao be jailed. Before the soldiers could take him prisoner, however, King Abdullah sought his own justice.

A team of Saudi assassins dressed in long, flowing, hooded black robes slipped onto the floor where Sun Tao’s offices were located. The floor lacked its usual complement of guards, the knowledge that Tao was a marked man having already swept through the building. No one wished to appear loyal to a man on the wrong side of the prime minister.

The man who only hours before had wielded incredible power was now a pariah.

Slipping quietly into Tao’s office, two of the assassins held him in place in the chair behind his desk as the leader of the team read from a sheet of paper in Arabic. The paper contained the charges and sentence of an Islamic court. Although Tao had no idea what was being said, he understood the sentence as soon as the leader removed a large polished steel scimitar from beneath his robe and motioned for Tao’s head to be placed on his desk.

Tao struggled against the hands that held him but his efforts were in vain.

With both hands firmly around the hand-tooled solid silver handle of the saber, the leader of the assassins swung the blade down with all his might.

The beheading took but one swipe of the razor-sharp blade-the scalping, one more.

When the soldiers sent by the prime minister arrived at Tao’s office they were met by a grisly sight. Tao’s head had been cleanly removed from his neck and the top of his skull and his scalp lopped off. The open skull that sat on his desk resembled a coconut with its top chopped off by a machete, the inside filled with tuna fish dip.

Tao’s face bore an ugly grimace made all the more horrifying by the empty stare in his blank, lifeless eyes. Tao’s torso, minus the head, sat upright in his chair.

When the news of Tao reached the prime minister it confirmed him in his decision.

Taking a plastic bottle from his desk drawer, he emptied a measure of white powder into a glass of plum wine, then stirred the mixture with his letter opener. Glancing out the window at the square below, he guzzled the liquid with a vengeance.

Three minutes later he took his last sleep.

Taft sat at the desk in the office at his home along the Potomac River. He was exhausted. The type of bone-weary tiredness that comes after intense, protracted stress is finally relieved. The type of melancholy and malaise that come from the burden of knowledge. It is said a person’s life work molds his being, forms his backbone, drives his existence.

Taft was a man full of doubt.

He had begun his career with the NIA fresh out of the army, full of patriotic fervor and with the strong sense he was doing what was right and good. More and more, lately, he wondered if he was part of the solution or instead part of the problem. His sense of humor, one of the hallmarks of his personality, seemed to be slipping away.

After putting the finishing touches on the report he was writing, he pushed Save on his computer and stored the information onto a disk, then ran a program that scrubbed his hard disk clean. Then he reached for the telephone.

“This is Agent Taft,” he told the switchboard operator at the NIA. “I need a secure courier for a pickup at my home.”

At the NIA the operator consulted a schedule listed on the computer screen. “We’ll send someone right away, Agent Taft.”

“Thanks,” he said as he hung up the telephone.

Taft needed to get away, to cleanse his soul, to feel the power and the beauty of nature. Sitting back in his office chair, he reached for the telephone, then hesitated. Grabbing the telephone, he dialed the number from memory.

“National Museum of American History, Kristin Fazio speaking.”

“I’m sorry, I was trying to reach Quickies-R-Us,” Taft said easily.

“I’ve quit all that,” Fazio said. “It seems that every time I do that, the gentleman never calls me back.”

“Sorry about that,” Taft said. “Would it help if I told you I haven’t called you because I was involved in a matter that threatened the very existence of the world?”

“No need to lie,” Fazio said. “A simple apology would suffice.”

“I’m sorry,” Taft said. “What I did was inexcusable.”

“That’s about the tenth time, Taft,” Fazio said.

“Let me take you away from all this to make it up to you,” Taft said easily. “Can you take a few days off work?”

“I work for the government,” Fazio said, “what do you think?”

“Good,” Taft laughed. “Bring some sweaters-it can get cold on the water this time of year.”

“I take it we’re going for a cruise on Tango,” Fazio said.

“That’s the plan,” Taft said. “Just come over after work. I’ll provision the boat and we’ll set out tonight.”

“I’ll need to stop by my house first,” Fazio said, “so look for me about sixish.”

Taft paused before speaking. “I really am sorry, Kristin.”

“Don’t worry,” Fazio said, “I’ll make you pay.”

Reaching into the desk drawer, Taft removed a set of keys for his boat and tucked them in his pocket. Just then chimes rang as the sensors buried in his driveway registered a car approaching. He walked to the front door with the disk. Opening the door, he smiled at the tall young man who wore a crew cut and a serious expression.