tower.
“It looks like thermal damage,” she said. “But high heat or fire would damage the surface layer of the epidermis the most.”
“Exactly,” he said. “That’s the whole reason we have an epidermal layer of dead skin cells. As thin and weak as it is, it’s basically a shell designed to keep moisture in and other things out.”
She turned back to the microscope and glanced at the cells one more time. She thought about the plastic slivers under the other scope to her side.
Gamay looked up from the microscope again. “Mrs. Nordegrun told Kurt she’d seen things in her head.”
Smith scanned through the notes. “She told Kurt that she’d seen stars in front of her eyes right before she went down. She said, ‘I don’t want to sound crazy, but it looked like miniature fireworks going off in front of my eyes. I thought I was seeing something, but when I closed my eyes tight they were still there.’”
“I once read about astronauts experiencing something similar,” Gamay said. “On a shuttle mission a few years ago, they saw sparks or shooting-star patterns even when they closed their eyes.”
Smith sat up a little straighter. “Do you remember the cause?”
She thought back. “They were in orbit during a solar flare event. Despite the shielding on the crew’s quarters, some of the high-energy rays made it through. As these rays impact the cones and rods in the eye, they trigger neurological responses that register as starbursts in front of their eyes.”
“Not a hallucination?”
“No,” she said. “They’re actually seeing these things the same way I see you right now. Cones and rods transmitting a signal to the mind.”
Dr. Smith listened and nodded thoughtfully. He stood up, walked over to the microscope, and took another peek at the tissue sample himself.
“When I was in the Air Force, probably before you were born, I remember a young man who walked in front of one of our Phantom jets during the middle of a radar test. He was just a kid, an enlisted guy a month out of basic. Nobody saw him coming. Unfortunately for him, that particular jet was what we called a Wild Weasel, designed to emit powerful radar bursts and flood the enemy screens with so much signal that they couldn’t pick out our planes from the mess on their screens.”
“What happened?”
“He let out a shout, fell to his knees, and then flat on the floor,” Smith said. “The chief shut the radar off, and we dragged the kid to the infirmary, but he was already dead. Strangely, his skin was not hot to the touch. Turned out he’d fried from the inside out. As horrible as it sounds, he’d basically been cooked like a meal in a microwave. I was just a medic at the time, but I remember looking at his tissue under a microscope. It looked an awful lot like this.”
Gamay took a breath, trying to put away the horror of what she’d just been told and focus on the scientific evidence.
“And the metal looks as if it’s been arc-welded,” she said.
He nodded.
“High-energy discharges can cause the resistance in the air to break down and electrical energy to jump the gaps,” she said. “I’ve spent enough time with Kurt and Joe to know that that’s exactly what arc welding is.”
“Man-made lightning,” Smith said. “That’s why fuel and ordnance have to be handled in certain ways on base. Even a static-electric charge can ignite petroleum fumes.”
“The marks on that cable look like a lot more than a static discharge,” she said.
He nodded again, a sober look settled on his face. She guessed the doctor had a theory of what had happened. She guessed it would match what she was about to suggest.
“The lights blew,” she said. “The equipment failed, even the emergency beacon. Otherwise, someone would have heard a distress signal. The captain’s wife saw stars, and the poor crewmen on the upper levels were cooked from the inside out.”
She looked him straight in the eye. “That ship was hit with some type of massive electromagnetic burst. It would have to be of ultrahigh intensity to do the damage we’ve seen.”
“A thousand radar emitters turned on to full power wouldn’t do what we’ve seen,” the doctor said.
“Then it’s something more powerful,” she said.
Dr. Smith nodded, looking grave. “Has to be.”
She paused, trying not to let her thoughts run away with her. “Do we even want to consider that it might be naturally occurring?” she asked, thinking about the anomaly Kurt and Joe were investigating a few hundred miles to the east.
“And the pirates just happened upon the stricken ship in the right place at the right time? And then someone accidentally tried to kill you and Paul for investigating it?”
Of course not, she thought. “Then it has to be a weapon,” she said. “Something powerful enough to fry a five-hundred-foot vessel without any warning.”
Smith offered a sad smile. “I concur,” he said. “As if the world doesn’t have enough to worry about.”
She sensed it was she who was concurring with him, but it didn’t matter.
“I have to talk to Dirk,” she said.
Dr. Smith nodded. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on Paul.”
27
THE VIEW FROM DIRK PITT’S OFFICE on the twenty-ninth floor of the NUMA headquarters building included much of Washington, D.C. From the generous rectangular window he could watch over a section of the shimmering Potomac, the Lincoln and Washington monuments, and the Capitol building, all of which stood lit up in brilliant white for the evening.
Despite the view, Dirk’s attention was directed elsewhere, toward the monitor of his computer, on which a three-way teleconference was proceeding.
In one corner, the smiling face of Hiram Yaeger, NUMA’s resident computer genius. Yaeger looked as if he’d just come off the road on a Harley; he wore a leather vest and had his long graying hair pulled back into a ponytail.
In the other corner of Pitt’s screen, a drawn and waifish version of Gamay Trout gazed up at him. Her deep red hair was also pulled back, but out of necessity rather than style. Occasionally, as she spoke, a stray lock worked itself loose and fell in front of her eyes. She would diligently push it back behind her ear or keep talking as if she didn’t notice.
Despite her obvious pain, and eyes Pitt had never seen so dark, she seemed to be holding it together. Certainly she’d helped them take a big step forward in solving the mystery of what happened to the
As she explained a theory she and the
While Pitt listened and asked what he thought were pertinent questions, Yaeger took notes and mostly grunted the occasional “Uh-huh” and “Okay.”
When Gamay was done speaking, Pitt turned to Yaeger. “Can you run a simulation on what she described?”
“I think so,” Yaeger said. “Gonna be a shot in the dark, to some extent, but I could put you in the ballpark.”
