Sandstorm (Sigma Force 1)

Painter shifted closer, ready for some answers. The screen’s desktop filled with a black-and-white video.

“This is the security surveillance for the British Museum.”

He sat silently as the video rolled. A guard appeared on the screen, entering a museum gallery. It didn’t take long. As the explosion ended the tape, whiting out the screen, Painter sat back. His two superiors studied him.

“That luminous sphere,” he said slowly. “That was ball lightning, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Indeed,” Admiral Rector confirmed. “It was the same assessment that drew the attention of a pair of researchers with the Defense Sciences Office who were in London. Ball lightning has never been caught on film.”

“Or been that destructive,” Dr. McKnight added.

Painter recalled a lecture he’d heard during his Sigma Force training in electrical engineering. Ball lightning had been reported from the times of the early Greeks, seen by groups of people and reported in many places. Its rarity had kept it a mystery. Theories for its formation varied from free-floating plasma caused by the ionization of air during thunderstorms to the vaporization of silicon dioxide from the soil after lightning struck the ground.

“So what happened at the British Museum?” he asked.

“This.” Admiral Rector had removed an object from a desk drawer and placed it on his blotter. It looked like a blackened piece of rock, about the size of a softball. “We had it shipped on a military jet this morning.”

“What is it?”

The admiral nodded for him to pick it up. He did and found the object unusually heavy. Not rock. It felt dense enough to be lead.

“Meteoric iron,” Dr. McKnight explained. “A sample from the artifact that you saw explode a moment ago.”

Painter placed the chunk back on the desk. “I don’t understand. Are you saying the meteor caused the explosion? Not the ball lightning.”

“Yes and no,” McKnight answered cryptically.

“What do you know of the Tunguska explosion in Russia?” Rector asked.

The sudden shift in subject caught Painter off guard. His brow furrowed as he dredged up old history. “Not much. Something about a meteor strike, back in 1908, somewhere up in Siberia, caused a big blast.”

Rector leaned back. “ ‘Big’ is a bit of an understatement. The explosion uprooted a forest for forty miles around, over an area about half the size of Rhode Island. The blast liberated the energy equivalent of two thousand atomic bombs. Horses were knocked over four hundred miles away. Big just doesn’t quite cover the extent of the explosion.”

“There were other effects, too,” McKnight said. “A magnetic storm created a vortex for six hundred miles all around. For days afterward, the night skies were luminescent from the amount of dust, bright enough to read a newspaper by. An EM pulse wrapped itself halfway around the world.”

“Christ,” Painter mumbled.

“Those who witnessed the blast from hundreds of miles away reported seeing a streaking bright light in the sky, as brilliant as the sun, trailing a tail of iridescent colors.”

“The meteor,” Painter said.

Admiral Rector shook his head. “That was one theory. A stony asteroid or comet. But there are several problems with that theory. First, no meteor fragments have ever been found. Not even any telltale iridium dust.”

“Carbonaceous meteors usually leave an iridium fingerprint,” McKnight said. “But such a finding was never unearthed in Tunguska.”

“And there was no crater,” the admiral added.

McKnight nodded. “The force of the blast was forty megatons. Prior to that, the last meteor to even come close to such force struck Arizona some fifty thousand years ago. And it was only three megatons, a mere fraction of Tunguska, and it left a massive crater a mile wide and five hundred feet deep. So why no crater, especially when we so clearly know the epicenter of the blast due to the radial felling of the trees outward from ground zero?”

Painter had no answer to this…or to the more immediate question in his mind: What did any of this have to do with the British Museum?

McKnight continued. “Since the time of the explosion, there have also been interesting biological consequences noted in the region: an accelerated growth of certain ferns, an increase in the rate of mutations, including genetic abnormalities in the seeds and needles of pine trees and even ant populations. And humans have not escaped the effect. The local Evenk tribes in the area demonstrate abnormalities in their Rh blood factors. All clear indications of some radiological exposure, most likely gamma in origin.”

Painter tried to wrap his mind around a craterless explosion, unusual atmospheric effects, and residual gamma radiation. “So what caused all this?”

Admiral Rector answered, “Something quite small. About seven pounds.”

“That’s impossible,” he blurted.

The admiral shrugged. “If it was ordinary matter…”

The mystery hung in the air for a long moment.

Dr. McKnight finally spoke. “Newest research as of 1995 suggests that what struck Tunguska was indeed a meteor—but one composed of antimatter.”

Painter’s eyes widened. “Antimatter?”

He now understood why he had been called into this briefing. While most folks considered antimatter to be the realm of science fiction, it had become reality in the past decade with the production of antimatter particles in laboratories. Leading the forefront in this research was CERN Laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland. The lab had been producing antimatter for close to two decades using a subterranean Low Energy Antiproton Ring. But to date, an entire year’s production of antiprotons by CERN would produce only enough energy to flicker a lightbulb for a few moments.

Still, antimatter was intriguing. A single gram of antimatter would produce the energy equivalent of an atomic bomb. Of course, someone would first have to discover a cheap, readily available source of antimatter. And that was impossible.

Painter found his eyes on the lump of meteoric iron resting atop Admiral Rector’s desk. He knew that the upper atmosphere of the Earth was under constant bombardment by antimatter particles in cosmic rays, but they were immediately annihilated when they came in contact with atmospheric matter. It had been postulated that there might be asteroids or comets in the vacuum of space composed of antimatter, left over from the Big Bang.

He began to connect some of the dots in his head. “The explosion at the British Museum…?”