Matthew Reilly: Scarecrow Returns

“Even the location of Dragon is no accident: it sits at the top of the world, at the start of the spiraling wind-pattern we call the jet stream. Anything hoisted up into the air above Dragon is quickly whisked around Europe, southern Russia, then China, Japan and across the Pacific to America. It’s the same jet stream that swept that volcanic ash cloud from Iceland across Europe. But the thing is—” The DIA deputy director paused.

The room waited in silent anticipation.

“—the Soviets couldn’t get it to work. The TEB-based acid-rain project never got beyond the test phase. Instead, by accident, the Soviets created something much more dangerous.

“There are rumors in the scientific weapons community that they found another use for their TEB–Venusian gas compound: namely, sending a combustible gas cloud up into the atmosphere and igniting it with a powerful catalytic blast, creating an ‘atmospheric incineration event.’”

“A what?”

“They set the atmosphere on fire. The science is fairly straightforward: for a fire to burn, it requires oxygen. A device like this takes that principle to the ultimate extreme—technically it’s called a thermobaric weapon, or a fuel-air bomb, because, once ignited, the explosive uses oxygen in the air as the main fuel for the blast. Weapons specialists call it a Tesla Device, after the great Nikola Tesla, who postulated a weapon that could ignite the entire atmosphere.

“But such a weapon would require a massive amount of gas in the atmosphere and an ignition device of extraordinary heat and power—a semi-nuclear weapon, essentially—and we don’t believe the Soviets ever managed to build such a device.”

A cough.

It was the CIA’s representative. He cleared his throat and spoke for the first time.

“That,” he said, “may not be entirely correct.”

DRAGON ISLAND,” the CIA man said, “was indeed one of the crazy outliers of the Cold War.

“Let’s not be delicate about it. What the Soviets did there was seriously fucked up. It was cutting-edge science, with no boundaries, ethical or other-wise—at Dragon, Russia’s best physicists were allowed to work with the most exotic and dangerous substances known to man, including those Venus samples you mentioned, all to create new forms of death. Dragon Island was the crown jewel of the Soviet Army’s Special Weapons Directorate. Its scientists not only pushed the envelope, occasionally they broke through it. Dragon was their Area 51, Los Alamos and Plum Island all rolled into one.

“But when the USSR collapsed in 1991, Dragon Island’s program was terminated. Only thing was, the stuff they built there was so exotic, destroying it raised more questions than answers. And so the Russkies have just been sending skeleton crews there ever since, just keeping the lights on, so to speak, making sure stable solids don’t become unstable liquids and that compounds meant to be stored at absolute zero stay at absolute zero. Put simply, Dragon Island still is a house of horrors.”

He turned to the President. “And it is my unfortunate duty to report to you, sir, that the Russians did in fact build a Tesla Device and it is kept at Dragon.

“They called it the ‘Atmospheric Weapon’ and it is a two-stage device: the first stage is the combustible gas which is belched up into the atmosphere via a pair of massive vents on Dragon; the second stage is the explosive catalyst that ignites the gas. This catalyst is basically a quasi-nuclear explosive composed of a spherical inner core of corrupted uranium-238—so-called ‘blood uranium’ or ‘red uranium,’ because of its deep maroon color. Red uranium is not as potent or as radioactive as yellowcake, but its corrupted atomic structure makes it react with TEB far more intensely than a regular thermonuclear blast would; indeed, a regular nuke wouldn’t set off such a gas cloud.

“A red-uranium sphere is small, roughly the size of a golf ball. You encase one in a standard beryllium bridge-wire implosive detonator—the kind you find inside a regular nuclear weapon—and then fire the whole unit by missile into the gas cloud. The subsequent blast is hot enough to light the gas and set off the incineration—a rolling chain-reaction of white-hot acid-fire follows, sweeping around the northern hemisphere, igniting the atmosphere itself. It’s like lighting gasoline with a match, only this creates a firestorm of global proportions.”

The President shook his head in disbelief. “Who builds something like this? If it destroys the northern hemisphere, it destroys them, too.”

“In fact, sir, that’s exactly why it was built,” DIA Deputy Director Gordon said. “A device like this is called a ‘scorched earth’ weapon: it’s the weapon you use when you’ve lost a war. When the Germans saw that they’d lost World War II, they retreated, burning farms as they went, scorching the earth. The idea was that if they were going to lose the war, then the victors would not gain anything by winning it.

“The Soviet atmospheric weapon is similar: in the event of the United States disabling or destroying their stockpile of ICBMs in some kind of hostile exchange, the Soviets, facing certain defeat, would set off the atmospheric weapon, leaving nothing behind but scorched earth for the victors.”

“Only this weapon doesn’t just scorch their country, it wipes out the entire upper half of the Earth,” the President said.

“That’s correct, sir,” Gordon said. “Mr. President. If someone has taken Dragon Island and initiated its Tesla Device, then, yes, we have a problem, but it appears we’ve caught it in time. Whoever is at Dragon Island would need to have spewed the combustible aerosol into the atmosphere for weeks for the weapon to be in any way effective.”

Relief fell over the Situation Room.

The NRO man, Bowling, however, swallowed deeply.

“Then you don’t want to see this.” He hit a key on his laptop that projected a new image onto the screen. “This image was taken four weeks ago:

“And this one, two weeks ago:

“And this last image was taken forty-five minutes ago, after we caught Mr. Ivanov’s distress signal:”

“Holy shit . . .” someone breathed.

“Jesus Christ . . .”

The murky cloud had swept around the entire northern hemisphere in an ugly elongated spiral, blanketing every major landmass in the top half of the world. It looked like an oil slick that had stained the planet, only this was in the atmosphere. The image of the befouled Earth loomed in front of the shocked faces of the Crisis Response Team.

“Whoever took Dragon Island has been belching out combustible gas for nearly six weeks,” Bowling said. “They sent it up into the jet stream and the jet stream did the rest. The entire northern hemisphere is now covered by this gas cloud.”

At that moment, a young assistant ran into the room and handed a transcript to the DIA deputy director, Gordon.

The deputy director read it, then looked up sharply. “Mr. President. This is from our Russian MASINT station. It just intercepted an emergency transmission from the head of the Russian Special Weapons Directorate in Sarov to the Russian President in Moscow. It reads: