Devil's Gate (NUMA Files 9)

To avoid it, Hudson kept his eyes down, scanning the instruments and making sure the plane’s wings stayed level. He kept the climb to a safe five-degree angle.

At two thousand feet and three miles out, the weather got worse. Turbulence shook the plane, violent up-and downdrafts threatening to rip it apart. Rain lashed the windshield and metal around him. The hundred-fifty-mile-an-hour slipstream kept most of it from pouring in through the shattered corner window, but some of the moisture sprayed around the cockpit, and the constant noise was like a freight train passing at full speed.

With the bullet holes and the broken window, Hudson couldn’t pressurize the plane, but he could still climb to fourteen thousand feet or more without it becoming too cold to function. He reached behind his seat and touched a green bottle filled with pure oxygen; he would need that up higher.

Another wave of turbulence rocked the plane, but with the gear up and all four engines going Hudson figured he could power through the storm and out the other side.

The Constellation was one of the most advanced aircraft of the day. Designed by Lockheed with help from world-famous aviator Howard Hughes, it could cruise at 350 knots and travel three thousand miles without refueling. Had they picked Tarasov up a little farther west, Hudson would have gone for Newfoundland or Boston without stopping.

He turned to check his heading. He was crabbing to the north more than he intended. He went to correct the turn and felt a spell of dizziness. He leveled off, just as a warning light came on.

The generator in the number 1 engine was going, and the engine was running extremely rough. A moment later the number 2 engine began to cut out, and the main electrical warning light came on.

Hudson tried to concentrate. He felt light-headed and groggy as if he’d been drugged. He grabbed his shoulder where the bullet had hit him. The wound was painful, but he couldn’t tell how much blood he was losing.

On the instrument panel in front of him, the artificial horizon — an instrument pilots use to keep wings level when they can’t see outside — was tumbling. Beside it the directional gyro was tumbling.

Somehow the aircraft was failing simultaneously with Hudson’s own body.

Hudson looked up at the old compass, the ancient instrument that was the pilot’s last resort should everything mechanical go wrong. It showed him in a hard left turn. He tried to level off, but he banked too far in the other direction. The stall horn sounded because his

airspeed had dropped, and an instant later the warning lights lit up all over his instrument panel. Just about everything that could flash was flashing. The stall horn blared in his ear. The gear warning sounded.

Lightning flared close enough to blind him, and he wondered if it had hit the plane.

He grabbed the radio, switched to a shortwave band the CIA had given him, and began to broadcast.

“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” he said. “This is—”

The plane jerked to the right and then the left. The lightning snapped again, a million-volt spark going off right in front of his eyes. He felt a shock through the radio and dropped the microphone like a hot potato. It swung beneath the panel on its cord.

Hudson reached for the microphone. He missed. He leaned farther forward and tried again, stretching, and then grasping it with his fingertips. He pulled it back ready to broadcast again.

And then he looked up just in time to see clouds vanish and the black waters of the Atlantic filling the horizon and rushing up toward him.

1

Geneva, Switzerland, January 19, 2011

ALEXANDER COCHRANE WALKED ALONG the quiet streets of Geneva. It was well past midnight, on a dark winter evening. Snow drifted softly from above, adding to three inches that had fallen during the day, but there was no wind to speak of, and the night was hushed and peaceful.

Cochrane pulled his knit cap down, drew his heavy wool coat tighter around him, and thrust his hands deep into the coat’s pockets. Switzerland in January. It was supposed to snow and often did, usually taking Cochrane by surprise.

The reason for that was that Cochrane spent his days three hundred feet underground in the tunnels and control room of a massive particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. The LHC was run by the European Council for Nuclear Research, though it went by the acronym CERN as the French spelling used those initials (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire).

The temperature in the LHC’s control room remained a perfect 68 degrees, the lighting was constant, and the background noise was an unchanging hum of generators and pulsing energy. A few hours spent down there felt no different than a few days, or a few weeks, as if time wasn’t passing.

But of course it was, and it often stunned Cochrane how different the world appeared upon his return to the surface. He’d entered the building this morning under blue skies and a crisp, if distant, sun. Now the clouds hung thick, heavy and low, illuminated from beneath in an orange glow by the lights of Geneva. All around lay a three-inch blanket of snow that had not been present twelve hours before.

Cochrane walked through the field of white headed for the train station. The big shots at CERN — the physicists and other scientists — came and went in CERN-provided cars with drivers and heated seats.

Cochrane was not a physicist or particle theorist or any other designation of that nature. He was an educated man to be sure. He had a master’s in electromagnetic theory, twenty years of experience in the energy-transfer business, and was well compensated. But the glory of CERN went to the physicists and the others looking for the building blocks of the universe. To them Cochrane was nothing more than a highly paid mechanic. They were bigger than him. Even the machine he worked on was bigger than him. In fact, it was bigger than anyone.

The Large Hadron Collider was the largest scientific instrument in the world. Its tunnels ran in a twenty-seven-kilometer circular track that extended outside the territory of Switzerland and into France. Cochrane had helped design and build the superconducting magnets that accelerated the particles inside the tunnels. And as an employee of CERN he kept them running.

When the LHC was powered up, it used an incredible amount of energy, most of that for Cochrane’s magnets. After being chilled to 271 degrees below zero, those magnets could accelerate protons to nearly the speed of light. The particles in the LHC traveled so fast that they zipped around the twenty-seven kilometers eleven thousand times in a single second.

The only problem for Cochrane was that one magnet failure shut down the whole thing for days or even weeks at a time. He’d been particularly irked a few months back when a subcontractor installed a second-rate circuit board, which had promptly blown. Even now it boggled Cochrane’s mind; a ten-billion-dollar machine done in because someone wanted to save a couple euros.