Tom Lowe - The Black Bullet

O’Brien looked at his bare feet and wondered if he might be standing on top of the U-235. Eight canisters of the stuff could turn everything from here to the lighthouse, a distance of fourteen miles, into ashes. He used his right foot to mark an X in the sand and then found a large rock and lifted it onto the center of the X. He fished the cell phone out of his wet pocket and tried to call Dave. The phone was dead.

Forty-five minutes later, O’Brien stepped onto Gibraltar. Max jumped off Dave Collins’ couch in the salon and trotted to the sliding glass door. She whined a note as O’Brien slid open the door.

“Hello, Max,” O’Brien said, stepping inside. She ran around his feet, panting, tail blurring. He picked her up, and she licked his face.

Dave and Nick sat at the bar. CNN news was on the television behind them.

Nick said, “Whoa … you look like you been on a safari in the jungle.”

Dave stood. “How’d it go?”

“I think I’m close to a lot more HEU. Enough to blow Florida in half.”

Dave said, “You look like you could use a cold beer. Plenty in the fridge.”

O’Brien sat in a canvas director’s chair in the salon, Max curling at his feet. He told them the story from his meeting with Glenda and Abby and of his surveillance on Rattlesnake Island. “I feel I was close to that stuff, sort of like the feeling I had before swimming into the sub. Something eerie, but you don’t quite know what.”

“You got that right,” Nick said, lifting his glass in a toast.

Dave said, “So you found an area where the lighthouse beam was actually hitting the back window-you said the north side of the tower and shining through from the south side window, right?”

“Yes. When the light sweeps through the tower and aligns with the front and back opening, it shoots down a narrow, but long path. To find the U-235, if it’s there, you’d have to know where along the path they may have dug the hole. Maybe 200 feet south of the fort.”

“Let the stuff stay there,” Nick said. “An island named after rattlesnakes.”

“If I knew where Billy stood that night, knew what the inlet and the island looked like sixty-seven years ago … it might be easier.”

“This,” Dave said, fixing a fresh drink, “may sound strange to you-”

Nick shook his head. “Nothing we do, from this point, will sound strange to me.”

Dave said. “Have either one of you ever heard of remote viewing.”

“From what I read,” O’Brien said, “it was some kind of ESP used by the military. Some debate over its accuracy.”

Dave grunted. “It depends on the talents of the person doing it. We did tests in the mid-nineties. Bottom line: the person who is doing the remote viewing is using his or her subconscious to locate or find something. Could be a target like a missile silo, maybe some detail of a military base, whatever the individual is trying to locate. Time, space and geography are meaningless, have no bearing, no borders, no walls, if you will.”

“Sounds like psychic stuff,” Nick said

“No, no it’s not. It takes practice with specific techniques and protocols. But the trained viewer sort of taps into a universal mind where all things are allegedly filed, connected, stored in some way … past, present and future. Some people have called it a form of traveling via virtual reality.”

“That’s soul travel,” Nick said.

O’Brien asked skeptically, “So you think this might help us find the buried U-235 canisters?”

“Maybe. But we’d have to find the right person.”

“Plenty of psychics out there … way out there,” Nick said.

“They’re not psychics. They’re people, most of ‘em trained though the Defense Department, who often can get a fix on the location of something … something lost. They sketch the object on a piece of paper.”

O’Brien said, “I’m assuming you know someone with this talent.”

“I do know someone.”

“Time’s our biggest problem.” He looked at his watch. “We have thirty-nine hours to save Jason’s life. How quickly can you contact this remote viewing person?”

“Her name is Anna Sterling. She lives in an old farmhouse in Michigan. If we show her a picture of Fort Matanzas, give her the date Billy Lawson saw the Germans and Japanese bury the stuff, she might give us a location.”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “Sounds like this woman’s got to tap into the subconscious of a man who’s been long dead, maybe find his spirit.”

“Wrong idea, Nick. Time and space are irrelevant. It’s just how and where the event is floating in the universal filing cabinet, and whether Anna can open that drawer.”

“How do we find her?” O’Brien asked.

Dave Collins called Anna Sterling and told her what was at stake, and what they needed. She agreed to go online and speak with O’Brien via a camera between Dave’s laptop and the camera on Anna’s computer.

As the connection was made, O’Brien thought the woman on the screen looked like Suzanne Sommers. She said, “It’s been a while Dave. The project sounds intriguing. I don’t know if I can give you anything. I’ve had a long day. My brain is firing with more visual noise than I can cap, but for old time’s sake, I’ll give it a go.”

“Great, Anna. This is Sean O’Brien. He’s been to the site. At least where we think the site might be after all these years.”

Nick slid off the barstool and stood between Dave and O’Brien, looking at the screen. Anna asked, “And who is the handsome fella you have hidden behind you?”

Nick grinned and leaned toward the camera. “Nick Cronus … you come to Florida, I give you a boat ride. The ocean helps you see things better.”

“I’ll remember that,” Anna smiled.

Dave said, “We have a link to a picture of Fort Matanzas. I just sent it to you.”

“It’s here,” she said.

“Good. Sean, give Anna what you have.”

“Billy Lawson saw the men bury the material at night, May 19, 1945. We think it’s on a place called Rattlesnake Island. It’s national monument land, and it hasn’t been developed. Before Lawson was killed, he told his wife, a woman named Glenda Lawson, who’s still alive, that the men buried it on the island aligned with the path of light as it shines through the tower. The light comes from the old St. Augustine lighthouse.”

Anna stared at the image on her screen of Fort Matanzas, her eyes burning into the symmetry of the building. She didn’t blink for fifteen seconds. Intent. Concentrating. Then she squinted slightly, like she was seeing something at a great distance. She kept her focus, her body motionless.

Nick took a long pull on a bottle of beer and started to speak, but Dave held up a hand. Anna began sketching then paused, looked into the camera and said, “Give me a half hour. If I can complete something, I’ll scan in my drawing and e-mail it to you.”

“Anna, we really appreciate this.”

“No problem. It’s a lot different from what we did at Langley. I’m going to fix a hot tea and see what the leaves tell me.” She smiled, pressed a button and her image in the box on Dave’s screen went black.

“Tea leaves,” Nick said.

“She’s kidding,” O’Brien said. “Let’s see what the woman can do. Dave, do the intelligence agencies or DOD use anyone like Anna today?”

“I don’t know. The project, called Stargate, closed shop in 1996 amid controversy over costs versus real results. However, Anna was at the top of the class.”

Nick snorted. “So our government was training people to do this remote stuff?”

Dave sipped his drink. He said, “Some of this goes back to the study of quantum and theoretical physics during the second world war. A guy by the name of Ethan Lyons, who was working on the Manhattan Project at the time, first wrote a paper on Remote Viewing potential. He didn’t call it RV … called it universal perception and did some experiments with subjects drawing sketches of photos he sealed in envelopes. He had a success rate about twenty five percent over the average.”