Burke shifted in his chair, stretched his legs. He’d noticed that the time of the wait tended to increase with the rank of the bureaucrat, a measure of sorts. It was hard to be patient when you knew the situation: that people were suffering and dying while they waited for the supplies to arrive. But Burke had learned the hard way that protest or complaint only increased the time of the wait.
Finally, at eight in the evening, he had all the papers in order. He dined with three of his fellow aid workers. When dinner was done and the others adjourned to the bar, Burke went up to his room. Like many of the rooms he stayed in, the air in this one seemed to be filled with dust. But that was all right. He associated the gritty taste with Africa.
And he was happy to be back. He stripped off his clothes, brushed his teeth with some water tipped onto his brush from a bottle, then settled himself on the bed, pulling the mosquito netting around him. The ceiling fan ticking in its slow rotation might have irritated some, but for Burke it was a kind of lullaby.
Every night, whether he was sleeping on a cot, in a bed, or in the back of one of the convoy’s trucks, he sank into sleep with gratitude.
Months earlier, he’d complained to Tommy that Kate never came to him, as she had come to her father. But as soon as Burke returned to Africa, she was there, each night, in his dreams. It was pure solace. She was alive and well, funny and smart and full of insights about the work that he was doing. At times, she spoke seriously about what was and might have been. “We only live for a moment, Michael – the moment we call the present. But it lasts forever, and so will the love we had.”
Sometimes, she stayed all night, unless he tried to keep her there – in which case, she dissolved in the night. Eventually, he realized that the only way to keep her was to let her go.
And so he did.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For more about the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, and the source of Kicking Bear’s quotations of Wovoka, see: www.bgsu.edu /department/acs/1890s /woundedknee/WKmscr.html.
Hakim’s hashish-packaging activity was inspired by Howard Marks’s account of a similar operation, which he describes in his extraordinary autobiography, Mr Nice (Martin Secker & Warburg, Ltd., London, 1996).
A second autobiography, this one by a former CIA officer, tells of his 1965 plane crash in the Congo, and of the infestation of his injuries by bees and other bugs. See The American Agent, by Richard L. Holm (St. Ermin’s Press, London, 2003).
Four books were essential sources for the Tesla material in Ghost Dancer. First and foremost, Margaret Cheney’s Man Out of Time is a mesmerizing read. Many anecdotes about Tesla’s life and exploits were drawn from its entertaining pages. John J. O’Neill’s Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla was another key source, as were David Peat’s In Search of Nikola Tesla and George Trinkhaus’ Tesla: The Lost Inventions. In addition, on-line sources provided invaluable details about Tesla and his inventions. Colonel Tom Bearden’s various sites are intriguing and filled with information, as are sites associated with Rick Andersen. Recommended also are sites of the Tesla Society and the New Tesla Society, as well as “Confessions of a Tesla Nerd,” by Marc J. Seifer, Ph.D. Timothy Ventura’s essay “Tesla’s Death Ray” was helpful in envisioning how such a weapon might work. “Radiant Energy: Unraveling Tesla’s Greatest Secret, Part 1” by Ken Adachi (June 1, 2001) (http: educate-yourself.org) offers insights into Tesla’s explorations of electrical phenomena – and photographs of the inventor and some of his inventions and experiments. The website of the Nikola Tesla Museum (www.tesla-museum.org) provides a wealth of information about the inventor. No physics text could come close to the wonderfully clear explanation of how the voice of an opera singer breaks glass – and other examples of “forced oscillation resonance” – at the website www.straightdope.com.
Legends abound about Tesla and the Tunguska incident, yet there is abdundant evidence that a devastating event did occur in Siberia at the same time Tesla was experimenting with the transmitter at Wardenclyffe. The notion that Tesla’s experiment caused the disaster, while not invented by the author, remains speculative. Numerous stories alleging that Admiral Peary stood as Tesla’s would-be witness to a promised arctic light show are clearly apocryphal; records show that Peary was not in the arctic at the time of the Tunguska incident. Windjammer Stevenson, an arctic explorer very famous in his time, lived for a long period above the arctic circle, much as described in the pages of Ghost Dancer. However, although Stevenson was in the arctic at the time of the Tunguska incident, the notion that he was Tesla’s “witness” is an invention of the author’s.
Various Internet sources served to enhance the author’s understanding of the electromagnetic pulse, including the explanation of the e-bomb as a possible terrorist weapon available at www.unitedstatesaction.com/ emp-terror.htm. Although both authors have visited maximum-security facilities, for operational and architectural detail about the federal government’s Supermax facilities, the authors thank the indispensable Wikipedia – which also contains an excellent essay on directed-energy weapons.
In September, 2004, the National Geographic magazine published a piece on Native Americans. The magazine included a supplemental map of North America. One side of the map provides detail about the linguistic families of Native Americans and their dispersal through the continent. The reverse side displays current tribal areas and populations in the continental United States. At the base of the main map, a series of four smaller maps, dated from 1775 to 2004, shows in graphic and dramatic fashion the transfers of land from native populations to settlers. Entitled “Long History of Losing Ground,” this series of maps served as the inspiration for Jack Wilson’s similarly titled high school project.
Various online sources, including the Berkeley Law Journal (www.law.berkeley.edu) provide further elucidation of the 1951 Invention Secrecy Act and its ongoing application.
The authors would like to thank Elaine Markson and Gary Johnson at the Elaine Markson Agency for their unflagging support. We are grateful also to Ronald Johnson and Ezra Sidran for answering technical questions. David Grove, a pilot, helped with queries about what would happen to an aircraft hit with an electromagnetic pulse.
Any errors, of course, belong to the authors and may not be attributed to their sources.
And finally, may thanks to everyone at Ballantine who helped bring this book to the shelves of bookstores and libraries.
May 4, 2006
Charlottesville, Virginia
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN CASE is the bestselling author of The Genesis Code, The First Horseman, The Syndrome, The Eighth Day, and The Murder Artist.
