Before Caulfield could register this shock, Dickerson tossed a file onto his desk after unlocking it from a compartment in his briefcase. Max Caulfield looked up with the photo of the Simbirsk still in his hand.
“And this?”
“A file on a warship of our own.”
“Don’t keep me guessing here, Scooter. I don’t have the time for it,” Caulfield countered.
“A destroyer escort, same vintage as our Russian war casualty. This file is on the USS Eldridge. This is all we have on her. It seems the Department of the Navy, or at least at the time, the Department of War, lost the entire file just after the incident. Many people in my group think it was intentionally lost by the navy department on orders from none other than President Roosevelt. The rumor is the navy boys tried to do something rather extraordinary that had not been cleared with the war department. That was right around the time that Admiral Stark, the chief of naval operations, lost a lot of influence at the White House.”
Max looked at the file and then looked up at his visitor after viewing the second photo. “This another war casualty?”
“No, Max, she wasn’t. She went on to serve the navy well throughout her deployments the rest of the war. We even sold her later to a foreign government. No, she had a very distinguished career.”
“Scooter, this is boring me to death. You bring me a partial file and then claim the rest has been lost. What in the hell is going on here?”
“General, that’s the ship that was the centerpiece of a little-known theoretic application undertaken by scientists from Chicago University and Harvard, jointly with the Department of the Navy. All this took place in 1943, and that experimental application turned disastrous for the navy.”
“What application, Scooter?” Caulfield said with resignation lacing his voice.
“That theoretic application was thought to produce what we would come to know as stealth technology. That theory and later action would be tagged by every conspiracy nut in the free world as the Philadelphia Experiment.”
Twenty minutes later, after his assistants had told him that the president was waiting on his morning security briefing, General Maxwell Caulfield asked for and received a private meeting with the leader of the free world that lasted just thirty-five minutes. In the three minutes after, the United States Armed Forces quietly went to a higher alert status.
The partial file on the Philadelphia Experiment had been read by a sitting president of the United States for only the second time in history.
The conference room was full. All sixteen departmental heads were present. Alice Hamilton was even there, popping in for meetings on a regular basis. Alice had been a part of the Group since 1947. She read the report filed by Jack and his excursion into Egypt. He reported the sting operation in cooperation with Egyptian Homeland Security had gone off without a hitch. Alice looked up and smiled as she saw the visible relief in the faces of Jack and Carl’s two replacements, Jason Ryan and Will Mendenhall. They were both still put out that the colonel had not included them on the mission, anything to get them out of the complex and into the field where they thought they belonged. Alice then flipped pages of her notes and then faced Sarah McIntire, who was sitting next to Master Chief Jenks.
“We have a report from Captain McIntire and Ms. Korvesky on their investigation into the expansion of the level forty-seven vaults.”
Sarah wanted to roll her eyes as she stood and reported on the granite strata she knew would not support further expansion in that area of cave system. Before she could finish, the double doors of the conference room opened, and an air force security officer allowed the new head of Computer Sciences into the room. Dr. Xavier Morales used his powerful arms to propel his old-fashioned wheelchair inside. He rolled directly to the head of the long table and Director Niles Compton. Sarah gratefully gave the twenty-four-year-old computer genius the floor. She was happy not to be spouting geological formations that no one but herself fully understood. Anya, for her part, winked at Sarah, being grateful herself for the respite.
Just as Morales stopped, another man was allowed into the room — Professor Charles Hindershot Ellenshaw III came in and held up a file so Xavier could see. Charlie nodded and then took his place at the table, excusing the young lady who had been substituting for crazy Charlie and the Cryptozoology Department. Morales waited until the doors were once more secure. He handed his own file to the director.
“Doctor, you have something more important to share with us than Captain McIntire and Ms. Korvesky’s report on the unstable rock strata of our complex?” Niles smiled and then opened the file folder. Morales had it marked as Director’s Eyes Only. Compton read. The straight line on his mouth told Alice Hamilton and the others in the meeting that he didn’t like what it was that the Computer Sciences director had brought him. Ryan and Mendenhall exchanged looks, as they had yet to see the young Mexican American excited about anything other than his new love affair with the world’s most powerful computing system, Europa.
“How did you come across this information, Doctor?” Niles asked as he handed the folder over to Alice, who perused it very quickly. The other department heads were left wondering.
Morales looked around, somewhat apprehensive about his answer.
Niles took a deep breath and then patted the closed file with his fingertips.
“Okay, I’m going to have to place this meeting on hold until the same time tomorrow. Sarah will enter her strata report into Europa and copy all departments on its content. Thank you. Drs. Morales, Ellenshaw, and Pollock and Alice, I need a moment, please.”
The room slowly emptied, and Niles stood and made his way over to his desk and then sat. Alice took her customary place to his left with her electronic notepad ready. The others took seats in front of the large desk once used by Garrison Lee, and General George C. Marshall before that.
“First, Dr. Morales, when you insert Europa’s influence into another Blue Ice system inside government circles, it has to be cleared with either myself or Virginia first.”
“I understand that, sir. The computer break-in was not initiated by me or anyone in the complex. Europa herself initiated it after receiving several keywords from flagged communications that she routinely monitors with your endorsement, sir.”
“I’m not following,” Virginia said.
“It seems someone with A-1 security clearance programmed Europa to seek out certain keywords from government communications. The keywords in this case were Eldridge, Simbirsk, phase shift, and a few others. In this particular case, she hit on all the words coming from the White House and the Pentagon.”
“Two are the names of ships. The other is an advanced theory on the implementation of redacted covert cover — stealth technology, or in this case, phase shift. It’s the ability to hide the radar signature from prying eyes. The other keywords mentioned in the order to Europa were Operation Necromancer and Schoenfeld. I know because I was there when then director Garrison Lee, myself, and Pete Golding placed them there in 1997.”
Xavier looked shocked, as did Charlie Ellenshaw. As for Alice and Virginia, they were both confused. Then it was Alice who closed her eyes and remembered something from the past about Garrison Lee and the one event he could not get out of his thoughts, an event rarely spoken of by the former director of Department 5656. Whatever it was buried in that memory, Alice knew it had scared the hell out of Garrison, a man who feared almost nothing in life.