clandestine place that gave the Spanish dominance after the slaughter of 250 French settlers.
As O’Brien moved farther toward the west, it appeared. A wink of light in the distance. To the northeast. Then it was gone. O’Brien waited and the light reappeared, the rotation of the lamp in the St. Augustine lighthouse took twenty seconds. He looked toward the northwest, the direction of the old Spanish fort. When the wind blew and the mist vanished, the coquina shell fortress was an outline in the moonlight. Its watchtower was a silent sentry, the block fortress still making an imposing statement.
The distant beam from the lighthouse took on a diffused look when the haze returned, drifting above the water, becoming lost in the dark. Then, suddenly, like a flock of startled birds in the wind, the apparitions were gone. The silent stone sentinel remained, the edges of the coquina blocks worn, resembling stooped shoulders in a halo of revolving light.
The light rotated in its 360-degree arch behind the old fort. Nothing punched through an opening in the watchtower. O’Brien kept walking in a westward direction, glancing up at the fort each time the light swept it. Nothing. He slapped the sand fleas biting the back of his neck.
Looking toward the fort, he waited for the rotation of the light. As it swept behind the fort, the turret was dark and ominous. O’Brien studied the stream and a large sandbar just beneath the surface that straddled almost the distance of the stream. He took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his pants and stepped into the water. It was cool, and he felt minnows nibbling at his ankles. O’Brien sloshed through the water glancing up at the fort each sweep of the light, walking toward Rattlesnake Island.
He dropped, water covering his head. It was as if a wool blanket was tossed over him. He knew he’d stepped into a hole. Water rushed around his body, sucking him downstream. A rip current pulled his clothes, his pants and shirt felt like dead weight.
O’Brien kicked through the current and soon found the sandbar again. He stood and regained his balance, water dripping from his face, hungry mosquitoes orbiting his head with bloodthirsty whines.
Rattlesnake Island had a strip of sandy beach, but fifty feet into the interior, it turned to mangroves and gnarled trees, bent like old men stooping in a field under the moonlight. O’Brien stepped across the sand a few feet to the west, wondering how the inlet, the island, and the topography had changed since Billy Lawson stood somewhere near. When he looked up toward the fort, he stopped in his tracks. In the direction of the lighthouse, it looked as if someone was signaling with a lantern from the watchtower, the window glowed for a second.
O’Brien was motionless, ignoring the mosquitoes. He watched for the light to return and the dark opening in the tower to shine for a moment. Again it was there. He stepped twenty feet toward the west and stopped. When the beam returned it wasn’t visible from the opening in the tower. He retraced his steps.
“Show me the light,” he said as the lighthouse winked in the distance, sending light through an opening on the tower’s north face to a stone window on the south side.
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.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Forty-five minutes later, O’Brien stepped onto
“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.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
