It was desert dusk when a change in the road surface brought him awake. Three tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan made Dwayne sensitive to things like that. He came around with a start. His hand clutched for the pistol grip of his rifle, but it wasn’t there. They were climbing a rutted road that twisted up between rocks and scree. After a half-hour, he could see they were approaching a tall structure that rose spindly and black against the streaked sky of the orange sunset. The road leveled out. As they pulled closer on the rutted trail, Dwayne could see it was a steel tower structure holding a globe about sixty feet off the sand. The globe was polished sheet metal and looked about ten feet in diameter. The ball caught the final rays of the dying day and cast an oily sheen from its surface. From the center of the globe, a steel rod rose another thirty or forty feet. The rod was secured in place with guy wires all around. It was topped by a flashing strobe.
“Is that a lightning rod?” Dwayne asked.
“It’s a Tesla tower,” the doc replied. “Awesome, isn’t it?”
“Looks like a ride at a state fair,” Dwayne said.
Tauber laughed. Not a condescending chuckle at Dwayne’s ignorance, but an open, honest laugh that surprised them both. Dwayne decided that he liked this geek.
The Land Rover pulled up to a trio of Quonset huts on the roof of a mesa. The collection of sand-blasted and sunbaked buildings were near the lip of the escarpment they’d been climbing up over the past thirty minutes. There was a dirt bike and a beat-to-shit Acura there. What looked like an old cargo container was partly buried in a high humpback dune beyond the Q-huts.
As Dwayne and the doc got out of the Rover, two guys stepped from one of the huts. They were short and dark. One was bearded and wore a Welcome to Reno t-shirt. The other was clean-shaven, except for a Saddam mustache. He wore an aloha shirt in a pineapple pattern. They studied the newcomers for a few seconds and went back inside without saying a word.
“That’s Parviz and Quebat,” Tauber said. “They’re Iranian.”
“They got a convenience store in there?” Dwayne said.
“No. They’re nuclear physicists.”
“Iranian nuclear physicists?”
“They stay here all the time,” Tauber said. “They’re kind of on a watch list. And they can’t go home because they’re homosexuals.”
“That must be a tough beat,” Dwayne said.
He followed Tauber as the doc trotted away toward the tower rising into the gloom.
“Nicola Tesla was a genius,” the doc said. “Greater than Edison. A seer. He invented the idea of this tower over a hundred years ago with the intention of projecting broadcast energy via electromagnetism. Imagine a network of these across the country drawing power from the air and providing inexpensive energy to anyone. And all without a single wire.”
“So, it’s a lightning rod,” said Dwayne. He began to wonder if this was a job or an investment pitch.
“In a way,” the doc said and slapped the base of a steel leg. It created a soft thrumming sound in the guy wires leading away from the globe.
“A massive power surge is required to jumpstart it. The surge runs to steel rods driven a hundred and thirty feet into the rock below the tower. That creates a cone of electromagnetic energy around the globe that spreads across the entire compound.”
“Uh huh,” Dwayne said. He was checking the perimeter around them. Force of habit. The compound rested on the edge of a rocky mesa that dropped off to mile after mile of flat, featureless desert. In the dark, it looked like the land on the approach to Baghdad. Empty and quiet. The dark was closing in as the sun set quickly. The horizon would soon be invisible.
“That EMP lasts only seconds. But it’s enough to power the Tauber Tube which is here,” said the doc as he walked across the compound to the rusting cargo container. The opening and six feet at the front of the cargo box were exposed, but the remaining fifty feet or so was buried in a high pile of freshly dug sand. There was a steel vent at the crest of the pile, and a thin trail of vapor escaped from it. An old Case backhoe sat on a trailer in some greasewood nearby.
There were two dirt bikes standing up under tarps by it. Tauber threw the door lever down and pulled at a hatch cover set at the end of the container. The squeal of the hinges echoed off the rocks all around. Doc grunted with the effort. Dwayne lent a hand, and the door swung wide. A gust of chilled air escaped from the dark interior.
“And this is what you want me to guard?” Dwayne asked.
“I didn’t bring you out here to guard the Tube,” the doc said. “I need you to go through the Tube.”
“A time machine?” Dwayne asked.
“In its simplest terms?” Tauber said, “yes.”
The half-buried cargo container served as an entryway to a block-walled chamber that was a thousand square feet minimum with a twenty-foot ceiling. Exposed vents poured cold air down into the room from above. This chamber was at the heart of the hill of fresh earth. There was a computer workstation set on a steel table. Doors to some rooms lined one wall. One door was open, and Dwayne could see a row of tiled stall showers. There were some pieces of equipment covered with cloths along another wall.
The farthest end of the big room was dominated by a row of thick, concentric coils with a corrugated steel platform suspended on the inside of the coils as a floor or walkway.
