“I’m a field investigator with NEST.”
“Nuclear response team. Your boss is Cliff Roberts, then?”
“That’s right.”
“He’s an ass.”
Cali grinned, warming to Lasko’s directness immediately. “That he is.”
“He’s ex-navy like me. I spent a year with him at the Pentagon. He has the imagination of a kumquat and half the brains. He only got his gig at NEST when Homeland Security was created after 9/11.” He indicated they should take the chairs in front of his desk, while he slid around to his seat.
The office was large and comfortable, with wainscoting and a plush green carpet. There were only a few framed pictures and papers on the walls, as well as an American flag. Ira also wore a flag lapel pin. There was a model of a submarine on a credenza, an old Sturgeon class that Lasko had served on as executive officer before moving over to naval intelligence.
He turned to Mercer. “So what’s so hellfire important that I have to give up a golf game with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs?”
“A couple hundred pounds of plutonium that’s been missing for seventy plus years.” Mercer explained about the naturally occurring nuclear reactor at Oklo and his theory of how what they thought was an unusually concentrated uranium deposit was in fact the remnants of a much younger reactor that hadn’t fully decayed.
“What are the chances there are other such reactors?” Ira asked when Mercer finished.
“Cali asked the same thing last night. Remote. I think this is probably the only one like it in the world.”
“So how did that guy find it? You told me at dinner the other night that he was either the best geologist in the world or the luckiest.”
“Chester Bowie was his name,” Mercer said, “and he wasn’t a geologist at all. He taught classics at a small college in New Jersey. He wasn’t looking for uranium or plutonium. He was searching for a mine out of Greek mythology.”
“Lost me.”
“According to mythology Zeus chained Prometheus for defying him and giving fire to humanity. The chains were made from an unbreakable metal called adamantine. Bowie thought he knew where the adamantine had come from. He ran into a little problem of funding his expedition and talked it over with a colleague from Princeton, hoping the Ivy League school might see merit in his research.”
“Not likely,” Ira growled.
“On the contrary. Someone at Princeton was very interested. None other than Albert Einstein himself. From what I gather, Nikola Tesla, the Croatian-born genius who invented the alternating current electrical system we use today, had contacted Einstein in the mid-1930s with the theory that there were elements higher than uranium on the periodic table. Remember this was six or seven years before Enrico Fermi created the first sustained chain reaction at the University of Chicago and four or five before Einstein wrote his famous letter to Roosevelt indicating the theoretical possibility of an atomic bomb.
“Bowie didn’t know how Einstein became aware of his grant request, but he did, and agreed to have Princeton fund his trip. Einstein warned Bowie that what he might find wasn’t adamantine from his mythology but a new and potentially dangerous element. Bowie was certain Einstein and Tesla had it wrong and was eager to prove himself to two of the greatest minds of his generation.”
“Was Bowie well regarded in his field?” Ira asked.
Mercer chuckled. “The guy was a total flake. A real zealot when it came to his theories. He refused to believe anyone but himself.”
“He sounds deranged.”
“He was. Obsessive-compulsive, arrogant, you name it.” Mercer picked up the story again. “So he went to Africa and using his research into Greek mythology, he found the mine. He mentions in his journal that there was an ancient stele there to mark the site.”
“Wait. What’s a stele?”
“A carved stone obelisk used by the Egyptians usually to mark a military victory or some important event.”
“So this goes back to the Egyptians?”
Mercer held up a hand. “That’s getting ahead of the story, but Cali and I both remember seeing it in the village square. It was about seven feet tall and very weathered. Anyway Bowie hired some locals to help him dig out samples of the ore. And as you know, ever since then the natives have been suffering from long-term radiation exposure. He crated up about a thousand pounds’ worth of dirt and made his way to the port city of Brazzaville. That’s where he realized that he wasn’t the only person looking for the ore. In fact it seemed there were a couple of groups interested in what he was doing in the interior. He was pretty sure his guide had betrayed him to some German agents.
“I’m sure you’re aware that the Nazis had a thing for the occult and had sent out teams of agents to find certain ancient relics. Hitler needed them to legitimize his claim about pure Aryan stock and all that crap. That’s how they came into possession of the Spear of Longinus, the weapon purportedly used to pierce Christ’s side.”
“I’ve seen the movie,” Ira said. “Lost ark and all that. Besides that fits with what you told me about others showing up at that village a few years after Bowie to mine the rest of the ore.”
“And gunning down most of the villagers,” Mercer added. “Anyway Bowie managed to get the crates of ore samples onto a tramp steamer called the
“Why didn’t Bowie stay with the ship?”
“Paranoia, plus he had just spent several weeks around plutonium without any kind of protection. He realized he was suffering from radiation poisoning and was also wracked with malaria and a few other fun tropical bugs. There’s a line in his diary that goes something like ‘For three days my bowels ran like the River Styx.’”
“Lovely.”
“The day after the ship sailed he was almost killed by a pair of men he believed were Germans. They tried to muscle him into a car but two other men dressed in dark suits came out of nowhere, shot the Germans, and vanished.”
“Who were they? Did he know?”
“He didn’t but we do.” Mercer’s statement invited an explanation.
Cali said, “Last night two men in dark suits showed up at my condo and forced me to go with them. They took me to Mercer’s, where they warned us to stop searching for something called the Alembic of Skenderbeg.”
“They were the same guys who wiped out Caribe Dayce and his army in Africa and took on Poli Feines at the Deco Palace,” Mercer added. “They called themselves Janissaries and said we were caught up in an ancient conflict we couldn’t possibly understand.”
Ira held up a hand. “Hold on. Are you saying that the men who saved Bowie in Brazzaville are the same two who took out Dayce?”
“No, but I think they belong to the same organization, a secret group that’s been around for at least seventy years and may have roots going back to the 1400s. Skenderbeg, whose real name was Gjergi Kastrioti, was an Albanian-born general in the Ottoman Army, a Janissary who eventually revolted against Sultan Murad II. He captured a key town in Albania and, with a force never exceeding twenty thousand, managed to keep the Ottomans’ quarter million men at bay for twenty-five years. He had close diplomatic ties and financial support from the Vatican because he was defending Christendom from Islamic invaders.
“What’s interesting, and why I mention all this, is that the name Skenderbeg is a local translation of the Ottoman, Iskender Bey or Iskender the Great. We know him as Alexander the Great. This morning I got in touch with an Ottoman history teacher at George Washington University to get some more background on Skenderbeg. It’s accepted conjecture that Skenderbeg was given this title because his military skill matched that of Alexander’s, but there’s another story, one that can’t be verified. It was rumored that he possessed a talisman of some sort that Alexander carried into battle against his greatest foe, Darius, at the Battle of Arbela in 331 B. C., and it was this talisman that allowed both men to defeat armies ten times the size of their own.”
“What sort of talisman?”
“The professor didn’t know, but I assume it’s this alembic the Janissaries mentioned. The professor said the
