Chapter 8
Bush Center for Geo-Electromagnetic Studies
New York
Monday
00.48 a.m.
Professor Derek Martin put the red phone down, walked around his desk and sat down hard in his leather armchair. He leant forward and wrapped both his hands around the back of his neck and rocked back and forward.
"Oh shit!.." he exclaimed loudly.
"They confirmed it was missing?"
"Yes."
"Fuck..." Mick replied.
For a moment neither said anything more, both lost in their own thoughts.
"And it was definitely the Stormchaser 3, not Stormchaser 1 or 2?" Mick spoke again.
"Definitely..."
"I'm sorry, Derek, I know you liked Kate a lot." Mick struggled with finding the right words to say. What should you say at a time like this?
"It was a long time ago...almost five years to be precise. But we were close. Very close...for a while."
"What exactly did they say?"
"That they lost all contact with the Lockheed WP-3D Orion at about twenty-nine minutes past midnight. One minute they could see it on their radar, and then the next it was gone. They lost all radio contact, and all instruments on the plane that were transmitting stopped abruptly. Apparently the G-IV Gulfstream was flying almost directly above them, and they saw a sudden flash of intense light coming from where the flight operations center said Stormchaser 3 was. And the satellite above also lost its microwave contact with the plane at the exact same moment. One moment the plane was there...and the next it wasn't. Maybe it blew up...or was hit by lightning...?"
"Come on Derek, it was in the middle of the most intense electromagnetic storms we've ever recorded. I think that it's more than likely that we've just lost contact with it for now...perhaps there is still too much electromagnetic noise in the air for any communications to get through?"
"Mick, you know as well as I that NOAA has been using the new high-powered MTS microwave communications system that can track the position of the aircraft almost to within a yard, even when normal radio contact can't get through. The NOAA Aircraft Operations Center in Florida just confirmed that they've lost contact with it on MTS too."
"Do we know its last position?"
"Yes... According to the last satellite contact it was flying through the eye of Josephine when Hanna and Isaias and Kyle collided with Josephine and pushed through the eyewall at 00:29 a.m. That puts them dead center of the collision, right in the middle of..."
Mick's eyes lit up. "...right in the middle of the Hunraken Cauldron!"
Derek jumped up and walked over to the wall of video screens, punching a few numbers on the virtual keyboard on the screen. "Let's look at the videos once again..."
A few seconds later they were both scrutinizing reruns of the satellite video images which showed the moment the eyewall collapsed at the center of Hurricane Josephine and when the other three superstorms pushed through, crushing the column of space at the epicenter and focusing the energy of the most powerful multi-megastorm ever recorded into a focal area from which it could not escape.
Once again they saw the area around the center of the new megastorm begin to shimmer and glow as a myriad of tiny pulses of light sparkled in the area around the collision center.
"Any second now..."Derek said excitedly, his hand outstretched towards the screen, waiting to point at the image the moment the strange pulse of light flashed at the heart of the storm. "...There! There, it is! Wow...do you think..."
"Wait,...hang on a second...remember, there were two flashes... Let's see the second....THERE! That one! What is that one? What was that second wave of light that flashed and spread outwards from the center?"
They quickly replayed the video sequence again, zooming into the picture and enlarging it as large as possible, straining to see any more detail that could tell them more.
Twenty minutes later the floor was covered with high-definition color photographs that they had printed off and were studying on their knees.
On one of the images, taken just before the eyewall collapsed, they were sure they could see the tiny, dark outline of Stormchaser 3 flying across the eye of the hurricane. The next images showed the area now covered by the storm clouds as they smashed into each other from the different directions. A few images later in the sequence of photographs laid out on the floor, they examined the position where the first pulse of light was seen by the satellite and realised that on a line of forecasted trajectory of the flying Lockhead WP-3D Orion aircraft it was almost directly ahead of where Stormchaser 3 had last been seen. The Orion had been flying straight towards it!
The second pulse of light that had appeared and spread out as a wave had started from a different position in space, somewhere behind and slightly to the south of where the first pulse had been recorded. From their reckoning, they related to two separate events, ...whatever they were.
Mick stood up and walked over to the water fountain, pouring himself a plastic cup full of cool refreshing water, before he said what both of them were thinking but not voicing aloud.
"Derek, what exactly were we expecting to happen? We were looking for a Hunraken Vortex... hoping for a Hunraken Vortex to be created. And stupidly, we sent an airplane into the area to search for it! Idiots! Your theory predicted that any physical matter caught in the Hunraken Cauldron would either be ripped apart and transformed into plasma or flipped to other dimensional coordinates where the e-pressure was lower. Well, I think we just saw the latter happen. Stormchaser 3 flew right into the Hunraken Cauldron and was pushed out of this world into some other point in space and time..."
Derek stood up and walked back over to the screen bank on the wall, his back turned to Mick.
"I know what you're saying. We both know it. Fuck...I think I just killed eleven people. I just sent Kate and ten other people through a Hunraken Vortex! They're gone. Probably dead. And it's all my fault!"
.
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Of the two Lockheed WC-130s from the United States Air Force Reserve's 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron that had been loaned to the Bush Center, one had already returned to base. The second had been ordered to fly back over the area where the four superstorms had collided just over thirty minutes before: the crew had been twenty minutes into the flight home when an order had come directly from the Pentagon instructing them to return to the collision area.
Colonel Brian Patterson had been monitoring the events taking place over the Atlantic with great interest. It was his money that covered the cost for over half of the Bush Center to be built, and although he had begun to wonder if the money had been well spent, at last it seemed that his investment may have paid off: their military satellites had shown that Stormchaser 3 had disappeared and was now nowhere to be seen. Which gave him great hope that after almost a decade of failure, the seemingly impossible had just happened.
Colonel Brian Patterson, or Professor Patterson, as his other title from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology alluded to, was an intelligent man who did not believe in fairies, wizards or ghosts, but who did believe in the miracles that could be performed from the proper application of the laws of physics and mathematics.
It was Colonel Patterson that had seen the potential of the work that Professor Derek Martin had done, and had then realised just what it could mean. His secretive Research and Development department buried deep in the hills in Colorado, had already spent billions conducting research into finding a way of making teleportation a reality, before Professor Martin had even published his thesis.
The research that his department was conducting was based on a completely different concept, and quite frankly, in theory it was more likely to succeed, but what made Professor Martin's ideas of interest to Colonel Patterson, was his proposal that in order to harness the power necessary to make teleportation possible, you would have to find a power source in nature that could unleash the requi
red energy on such a large scale. Until now, their approach had been to start building a very large nuclear power station from which eventually, enormous amounts of power could be switched into their laboratories to enable them to conduct their experiments.
Interestingly, as Professor Martin had explained in his thesis, whereas mankind would really struggle to create such power themselves, Mother Nature routinely could and did. Such power was frequently collected from the sun by the waters of the Earth's oceans, stored and then released into its atmospheric system through a simple, natural process called a 'Hurricane'.
What made Professor Martin's theories additionally interesting to the U.S. Defense Department, was the possibility that as well as explaining a possible way to transport matter from one point to another, it also alluded to the just as real possibility of travelling from one point in time to another, either back, forward, or sideways!
Whereas, only twenty years ago most scientists would never have seriously entertained the possibility that time travel could actually happen, breakthroughs in physics and mathematics now described several ways in which, under specific circumstances, time travel could actually take place. Although few would ever admit to it, Governments and scientists the world over, were now spending billions of dollars each year in pursuit of realizing this dream.
In one of his laboratories in Colorado, Colonel Patterson himself had over sixty scientists dedicated to this task.
In addition he funded several external projects that also showed potential, and he kept a very keen eye on their failures...and successes.
Such was in his interest in Professor Martin's endeavors that behind the scenes he had negotiated on his behalf to have resources in the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron made available to Professor Martin whenever needed. In addition for this experiment he had also secretly placed several members of his scientific team in NOAA: one was aboard Stormchaser 2, and another aboard Stormchaser 3.
Each knew the risks they ran, but were nevertheless committed to their tasks.
And should any experiment ever prove successful, and transportation through space or time through a Hunraken Vortex was ever achieved, his agents were fully trained as to what they must do, in the name of the United States of America.
Until now, this had been an eventuality that Colonel Patterson had never dared to let himself believe could happen.
Yet, rerunning the video footage of what had occurred over the Atlantic, and listening to the commentary that was coming back live by radio from the Lockheed WC-130 over the now peaceful 'storm-area', the hairs were beginning to rise on Colonel Martin's neck.
There was no sign of Stormchaser 3.
The indestructible military transponder that one of his agents had smuggled aboard the research airplane had stopped transmitting at twenty-nine minutes and forty-four seconds past midnight: the exact same moment the satellites had recorded the light pulse from the position where the transponder had last transmitted from.
NOAA had already requested for help from the US Navy to redirect some sea craft to the area to look for any signs of wreckage, but deep down, Colonel Patterson knew that they would find nothing, simply because there was nothing there to find.
Exactly where Stormchaser 3 now was, he had no idea. But he knew it was not anywhere in the Atlantic...or in this time frame.
Colonel Patterson was convinced they had just witnessed the impossible: the formation of a Hunraken Vortex.
At last, after all these years, Step 1 of the Rainbow2 project had been completed. An aircraft had been transported through space and time, and thanks to his advanced planning, it was carrying a member of the U.S. military.
Colonel Patterson was not an overtly religious man, but for the first time in years he said a silent prayer: he prayed that the crew of Stormchaser 3 had survived, and that his agent aboard would soon be able to complete the top secret task she had been sworn to complete on the other side of the vortex.