The Solomon Effect (3 page)

Naval Support Activity, Algiers Point, New Orleans:
Saturday 24 October 4:30
P.M.
local time

Colonel F. Scott McClintock, United States Army, retired,
stared through the one-way mirror at the small soundproofed room before him. October Guinness sat at one end of the table, a pad of paper and a pencil on the surface before her, a microphone clipped to the collar of her shirt. She was a small woman with a boyish body and honey-colored hair, which she wore pulled back in a casual ponytail. Dressed in a polo shirt and jeans, she looked more like a college student than a Naval officer. She was also the best remote viewer McClintock had ever worked with.

Most people had an imperfect understanding of remote viewing, seeing it as a magical ability to transcend time and space in order to gather information about a “remote” target. Only, there was nothing magical about
RV
.

The U.S. government’s awareness of the practice dated back at least to the end of World War II, when they’d captured a bunch of documents detailing some interesting Nazi
experiments in the application of extrasensory perception to intelligence work. But what really caught the attention of the guys in the Pentagon was when the Soviets started investing in “psychic” stuff big-time back in the seventies. All the U.S. intelligence branches—the CIA, the Army, the NSA—had sunk money into the procedure over the years, although they were very careful never to use the word “psychic.”

The term “remote viewing” was a nice, sanitized expression coined by two of the physicists working on the phenomena for the government out at Stanford Research Institute. As they defined it, remote viewing required strict adherence to specific, controlled scientific protocol. Some of the guys working with remote viewing for the Army back in the nineties had gotten sloppy. But McClintock was always very careful to adhere to protocol; he didn’t want anyone to be able to claim that their results were contaminated by leading questions and “frontloading.”

He watched as his assistant, Peter Abrams, took the seat opposite Tobie. Normally, the Colonel was the tasker, the one who guided Tobie through her remote viewing sessions. But a clean session required the tasker to be kept ignorant of the target, and the Colonel had defined this exact target himself. He’d warned the Vice President that remote viewing didn’t work well with this kind of target, but Beckham wanted to go ahead with it anyway.

McClintock had read about the impending terrorist attack in the press. He’d long ago learned to discount most of the sensationalism pumped out by the mainstream media, but according to Beckham, this threat looked like the real thing, and the government had virtually nothing to go on. They didn’t know who was behind it. They didn’t know what the terrorists were targeting. About all they did know was the date—Halloween—and that it was somehow linked to an old sunken U-boat.

McClintock felt himself tense with anticipation as he watched Tobie settle comfortably in her chair and close her eyes. Up until now, their viewing sessions had all been training runs. Remote viewing was a skill like anything else; the more you practiced it, the better you got. Now, finally, they were being given a chance to contribute to the defense of the country—and maybe show the doubters in D.C. what a good remote viewer could do, while they were at it.

The physicists out at Stanford who’d done some of the early research on remote viewing had demonstrated that most people can be taught to do it, the same way most people can be taught to dance or play the piano. But that didn’t mean most people were particularly good at it. Remote viewing was a talent, and Tobie Guinness was a remarkably talented viewer.

Successful viewing required sinking down into what they called the Zone, which was basically the same state of relaxed reception achieved by deep meditation. Tobie was very good at reaching that state. McClintock could see her visibly relaxing, her breath coming deep and slow.

“Today is Saturday, 24 October,” said Peter, the microphone system echoing his voice as it was fed to the Colonel and their taping system. “That’s good, Tobie. Relax.” Peter laid his open palm on the opaque manila envelope that rested on the table before him. “All right, using the information in this envelope, tell me what you see.”

Like McClintock, Peter was watching Tobie’s face. He saw her mouth open, her nostrils flaring as if she were gasping for air. “It’s dark. Cold. It’s like…I can’t breathe.
Oh, God.”
Her voice broke, her face going slack with horror. “They’re all dead.”

Since Peter didn’t know the target, he didn’t understand what was happening. But McClintock understood only too well. “Back her out of there, fast,” whispered McClintock,
his fingers curling around the frame of the one-way mirror because he knew Peter couldn’t hear him.

Peter might not understand what was happening in Tobie’s mind, but he recognized the signs of distress. “Okay, Tobie,” he said, keeping his voice calm. “I want you to back away from where you are a bit, maybe get above it. Now tell me what you see.”

Tobie took another breath and shuddered, but McClintock could see the tension in her begin to ease. She licked her lower lip. “There’s a long, rounded object. I think it’s metal but it’s…It must be old. It’s rusted. Wet. It’s resting on something bigger, something flat. I think it’s also metal.”

McClintock felt his heart begin to race. He’d been working with remote viewing for some thirty years. Yet every time he witnessed a successful viewing, every time he watched someone reach out with their mind and touch a distant place—he still felt the same chilling rush of excitement and wonder.

“Good, Tobie,” said Peter. “Now I want you to move a little farther away.”

“Okay.”

“Tell me what you see.”

“I get the impression of water. Lots of water. Rocks. Pebbles. It’s a beach. A rocky beach. There’s a rise of ground…here.” Her pencil scratched across the pad as she drew a rough sketch. “A rise with trees.” She paused. “I get a sense of cold. Clouds.”

“Good,” said Peter as she worked on her sketch. She barely glanced at what she was drawing. It was as if the image flowed directly from her mind to the paper. “Now look back at the long metal object. What do you see?”

“Wooden planks. It’s…it’s like a wooden platform or a dock. That’s it. It’s a dock. Wharves. A long stretch of wharves. But they seem old. Deserted. There’s a big piece of
machinery. Here.” She added to her sketch. “It’s yellow, and it sticks up in the air.”

A crane?
wondered McClintock, watching her.

Her pencil skittered across the page. She said, “I see a long row of something rectangular. I get the impression of storage, like warehouses, although they’re mainly empty. And a road. Here.”

“Can you follow it?”

“Yes.” There was a pause. “It goes up a rise.”

“Go to the top and tell me what you see.”

“It’s open, like a meadow. Maybe farmland. But it feels oddly empty, like it’s…like it’s abandoned.”

McClintock knew a sense of frustration. Remote viewing worked best when the viewers were given specific geographical coordinates and simply asked to describe what was there. Back in the eighties, the Army remote viewers up at Fort Meade had successfully described secret Soviet submarine installations and the insides of enemy embassies. But there was a reason remote viewing had never worked well when it came to finding missing persons. The viewer could describe a room, maybe even a house or a ravine in the woods where the missing person was being kept. But where was that house? Where was that ravine?

Where was this beach?

McClintock had heard stories about how, back in the seventies, remote viewers at Fort Meade had helped the government find a Soviet plane that had crashed in the jungles of Africa. But that was a rare success story in the history of using
RV
as part of an attempt to find missing people or things. The Army viewers who had tried to trace kidnapping victims in Italy and Lebanon had been able to describe the captives; they had accurately described their physical health and mental states, the rooms in which they were being held, sometimes even the street outside. But they’d never been able
to provide the specific type of information that could enable the Special Forces guys to go in and rescue anyone.

“Okay, Tobie,” said Peter. “Go back to the wharves and look again at the metal object. You said it was by the water?”

“Not by the water. On the water.” She worked on her sketches some more, refining them, adding details. “There’s another building. Away from the warehouses, maybe halfway up the hill from the water.”

“Tell me about the building.”

“I get the impression of metal. A wavy metal. It’s like another warehouse, but smaller. I can see cars parked behind it. No, not cars. Vans. Blue vans. I think they all have the same thing written on the sides.”

McClintock felt a renewed surge of hope. Most remote viewers couldn’t read words or numbers. McClintock had heard it had something to do with the way the two halves of the brain process information. But Tobie—like Pat Price, back in the seventies—could do it.

Her forehead crinkled into a frown. “It’s in Greek. No. Not Greek. Cyrillic.” A talented linguist, Tobie knew Russian. But many other languages, from Macedonian and Serbian to Belarusian and Ukrainian used the Cyrillic alphabet, and she didn’t know any of those.

“Militia,” she said. “That’s what it is. They’re militia vans. I think I can read…K…A…” Her frown deepened as she slowly sounded the word out. “KALININGRAD,” she said suddenly. “That’s it. Kaliningrad.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said the Colonel, pushing away from the window. He put in a call to Division Thirteen. “Matt? McClintock here. I think what you’re looking for is at a shipyard on a rocky beach in Kaliningrad Oblast. That’s right. Russia.”

Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia: Sunday 25 October
12:30
A.M.
local time

Stefan Baklanov awoke in the grip of a blind terror. He felt
his heart pound out one, two panicked beats before he realized the blackness that seemed to have swallowed him was merely the darkness of a cloud-shrouded night. It was another moment still before he remembered where he was.

He sat up, his arms wrapping around his bent knees, an ache pulling across his chest as he thought about Uncle Jasha and the others on the
Yalena.
There had been times during that long, seemingly endless swim to the shore when he’d come close to giving up and letting the sea take him. But he’d pushed on, even when his arms went numb and his legs felt so heavy he could barely move them. He still wasn’t sure how he managed to drag himself up on the rocky point, gasping for breath and shivering so hard he didn’t think he’d ever stop.

All he’d wanted to do was lie on the shore, close his eyes, and let exhaustion take him. But the throb of an outboard
motor somewhere in the misty cove had driven him up and across a rutted, narrow road into the protective shelter of a copse of birch. His legs had felt as wobbly as a newborn calf’s and his teeth chattered so hard he kept biting his tongue, but he knew he had to move or die.

He figured he’d covered maybe nine or ten kilometers, sticking to the fields and woods, hiding at the sound of every voice or approaching car, before he came upon the abandoned old German farmhouse. Built a century or more ago of good red brick, it sat well back from the main road in the midst of an overgrown field. There were tens of thousands of such houses scattered across Kaliningrad Oblast—entire villages whose inhabitants had fled west ahead of the conquering Red Army, or had been shot, or had disappeared forever into the frozen wastelands of Siberia.

The farmhouse door had long since been battered in and broken, but the old tile roof was still fairly sound and the stout brick walls kept out the cold wind that cut cruelly through Stefan’s wet clothes. He thought about building a fire to warm himself, then realized that would be a mistake. Staggering up the stairs, he rummaged around until he found a tattered old blanket. Stripping off his icy clothes, he curled up in a leaf-littered corner and fell immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep.

He’d had a vague idea of sleeping until nightfall and then pushing on under the cover of darkness. But when he now looked at his watch he realized it was already past midnight. He’d slept far longer than he’d intended.

He pushed to his feet. Hugging the motheaten blanket around his shoulders, he lurched to the nearby window and peered through the broken panes at the dark, silent yard below.

He stared in helpless frustration into the blackness of the night. He could vaguely make out the looming outline of
a collapsed barn and the distant, darker smudge of a copse of trees. But there could be a hundred men out there hiding in the shadows and Stefan knew he’d never see them. A sudden noise and a flurry of movement made him jerk back, gasping with terror. Then he let out a weak laugh as a barn owl landed on the rotting window casing, its eyes wide and staring.

The painful rumbling of Stefan’s stomach reminded him that he’d eaten nothing all day except for a few scavenged wild berries he’d found in the woods. He couldn’t stay here. Groping for his still damp pants, he reluctantly drew them on and reached for his shirt and sweater. He considered for a moment finding the nearest village and turning himself in to the militia. Only, he had no identity papers. Plus, going to the militia, now, would require him to admit his role in an activity that was not only illegal but could easily provoke an international incident. And what if the officials were corrupt? What if they were out there even now, helping the Major look for him?

Stefan turned toward the stairs, stumbling in his exhaustion and fear. No, he would avoid the militia, he decided; avoid the villages, avoid anyone who might betray him to the men who’d murdered Uncle Jasha and the others.

If he kept away from the main roads and villages, it ought to take him four, maybe five days to reach home. Until he’d started working with Uncle Jasha, Stefan had lived with his mother on the outskirts of a small hamlet near Yasnaya Polyana.

He’d grown up there, in a house much like this one, an old German farmhouse with a sweet-smelling hay barn and a pond and a flock of snowy white geese that honked imperiously for their dinner. At the thought, a wave of homesickness swept over him, so intense it brought tears to his eyes. He brushed them away, ashamed of himself.

At Yasnaya Polyana, he’d be safe. He told himself that once he reached home, everything would be all right.

At a small private airstrip near Primorsk, the man Stefan Baklanov knew only as the Major glanced at his watch. The Gulfstream was nearly loaded. In another moment the jet would be on its way and the most important segment of their assignment would be completed. All that remained, now, was to clean up a few loose ends.

Headlights stabbed the darkness and the Major turned. A black Durango braked at the edge of the field. A Chechen named Borz Zakaev climbed out of the car. He was a solidly built man of medium height with the red hair and scattering of freckles one sometimes saw in Chechnya. They were old comrades, Borz and the Major. Years before, they’d fought together in Afghanistan, when the Major had worn the
dish-dash
and long beard of a mujahideen.

“Did you find the boy’s body?” asked the Major in his stilted Russian.

Borz blew out his breath in frustration and answered him in English. “No. We crisscrossed back and forth across the cove for hours. We searched the shoreline. We even searched the beaches to the west, in case the current carried him around the point. Nothing. The only thing I can figure is that the tide must have taken him out to sea.”

“Or he made it to shore.”

Borz shook his head. “That water can’t be more than fifty degrees. He didn’t make it to shore.”

“Did you check the fishing village just up the road?”

Borz nodded. “Nobody’s seen him. I tell you, he’s dead.”

“And if he’s not? I’m not taking any chances.” The Major reached into his pocket and drew out the identification papers he’d taken from the
Yalena
’s strongbox. “His name is Stefan Baklanov.”

“Baklanov?”

“That’s right. He’s Captain Baklanov’s nephew. According to the ship’s records, his mother lives in the southeast, near Yasnaya Polyana.” He flipped open the papers to the boy’s picture. In the photograph, Stefan Baklanov was just a skinny kid with big eyes and a shock of dark hair. He didn’t look hard to deal with. “Make copies of this. I want you and your men to cover every road out of the area. Offer a reward. Without his papers, he won’t get far.”

Borz glanced over at the Gulfstream, its cargo now safely stowed aboard. “Does the General know about the kid?”

“Yes.”

Borz swore under his breath.

The Major slapped the side of the jet and stepped back, “I want this kid eliminated and I don’t care what it takes. Either find him dead or make him dead. This operation goes down in a week. If you haven’t found him in forty-eight hours, go to Yasnaya Polyana and take his mother hostage.”

“Yasnaya Polyana? You think he’ll go home?”

“If he’s alive, he’ll go home. Where else can he go?”