The God Particle Read online

  Praise for Tom Avitabile:

  “Frighteningly realistic. Most of Washington really works this way. Homeland Security had better read this one and take corrective action.”

  – U.S. Ambassador Michael Skol on The Eighth Day

  “Awesome. I could not go to sleep last night because I couldn’t put it down!”

  – Donna Hanover, WOR Radio 710 on The Eighth Day

  “The Hammer of God is a tightly plotted, fear-filled and all-too-realistic thriller that is finely written, in fact the best this reviewer has read in a long time. It should be a best seller and will make the reader anxiously awaiting the third and final novel in this thriller trilogy! Great job, Tom Avitabile!”

  – Crystal Book Reviews

  “Well done and insuring that the reader will grab book three as soon as available.”

  – Bookbitch on The Hammer of God

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  The Story Plant

  Studio Digital CT, LLC

  P.O. Box 4331

  Stamford, CT 06907

  Copyright © 2014 by Tom Avitabile

  Jacket design by Dara Bartosiewiscz

  Print ISBN-13: 978-1-61188-194-3

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-61188-195-0

  Visit our website at www.TheStoryPlant.com

  Visit the author’s website at www.TomAvitabile.com

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by U.S. Copyright Law. For information, address The Story Plant.

  First Story Plant paperback printing: June 2014

  Dedication

  To all the scientists who have delivered us from the dark ages, and to the men and women of conscience who have prevented them from returning us there.

  And to the submariners of America’s Silent Service — past, present and those still on eternal patrol. If I write a thousand books, I will never come close to honoring their courage, sacrifice and grit.

  Speaking to a packed audience Wednesday morning in Geneva,CERN director general Rolf Heuer confirmed that two separate teams working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are more than 99 percent certain they’ve discovered the Higgs boson, aka the God particle—or at the least a brand-new particle exactly where they expected the Higgs to be.

  The long-sought particle may complete the standard model of physics by explaining why objects in our universe have mass—and in so doing, why galaxies, planets, and even humans have any right to exist.

  – National Geographic, July 4, 2012

  With the discovery of the Higgs boson or something very like it under its belt, the world’s most powerful particle collider is ready to take a well-earned rest. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will shut down on 11 February ahead of around two years of upgrade work.

  The break, known as LS1 for ‘long stop one’, is needed to correct several flaws in the original design of the collider, which is located underground at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland. The fixes will allow the collider to almost double the energy at which it smashes protons together.

  – Scientific American, February 6, 2013

  All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

  -Albert Einstein

  We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

  -Walt Disney

  So a Higgs Boson goes into church.

  The priest says, “What are you doing here?”

  The Higgs Boson says,

  “You can’t have mass without me.”

  -Anonymous

  Preface

  Once upon a time… that is a refrain one might recall when first seeing the shores of Lake Geneva, dotted with fairytale castles, chateaus, small villages and picture-perfect walks. The calm, croissant-shaped ‘lake’ is actually a wide, flat portion of the river Rhone. On the French end of the crescent the gentle waves are refocused into a flowing river of crisp Alpine water that resumes its seventeen-year journey to empty into the Mediterranean Sea.

  The storybook setting makes this idyllic place a most unlikely point of origin for the smallest particle of God to be used to ignite the ultimate cataclysm: the end of Earth, the solar system, the infinite universes beyond, indeed of all existence — gone in a flash — a flash to be seen only once, upon the death of time itself.

  I. RUDE AWAKENING

  Twang… Speeong… Pop… Grundle… she couldn’t make out the noises through her cottony ears. As on an early school morning with her mother calling up to her room, Brooke… you’ll be late for the bus, she didn’t have the energy to open her eyes. Ten more minutes, Mom. She just wanted to lie there and catch a few more minutes of…

  A distant cough rose from within her, and upon inhaling, a knife-like slice of acrid air made her choke again. Her right cheek was stinging. Kaarrack… the intensity of that next percussive punch popped her eyes open. They immediately started to burn. She focused on the world, the world around her: sideways, and on fire!

  Before her mind could fathom the reality of the situation in which she had awakened, her instinct kicked in and she reared up, her palms scraping against the same sandpaper-rough surface that must have chewed into her cheek. Still disoriented, she sensed a blanket of intense heat enveloping her. As she tried to stand, her head spun and she fell back onto the skillet-hot metal floor. No, not a floor… a deck! Fear welled up inside her, forcing her brain to focus on the present. Without consciously deciding to do so, she was up and fighting a shifting equilibrium. That’s right, I am on a boat! There was an explosion. She grabbed at the pain at the back of her head.

  Then a tongue of flame lashed out. The scorching tip caused her to recoil and topple over the side railing that she had fallen near when the blast knocked her down. She fell a few feet and smacked into the salty cold of the sea. The shock of the immersion, the sudden muting of all sound into a watery gauze, and the radiating pain from the salt water digging into her bloodied cheek and hands snapped her into survival mode. She frog-kicked back up to the surface. Gasping for breath, she broke the surface of the ink-black water, which was streaked with orangey glints reflecting off the wave tops. Using her arms proved painful, but she managed to turn herself in the water, toward the heat, and saw she was yards from a burning ship. Around her was fiery flotsam and debris. The main part of the vessel was gone, seemingly bitten off by a huge sea monster that had taken out the wheelhouse and most of the superstructure with one bite. The ship was rolling over away from her. The bomb must have been on the far side, she thought. She spotted a chair cushion floating a few feet from her, and holding it beneath her chest and chin she kicked her feet, creating more distance between herself and the still-exploding vessel. Another concussive thud was immediately followed by a flaming piece of wreckage that landed with a splash just ahead of her. She made her way around it.

  Her head was sideways on the soggy but buoyant cushion. She had never been so exhausted, even on the survival course at Quantico, where pushing agents to their physical limits for three days was the whole idea. Out of the corner of her eye she saw something rip through the wave tops. She propelled herself upward to see if she could spot it again. There were four of them. Four fins slicing through the water… Sharks. She turned; there were more of them, circling her and the wreckage. About ten yards ahead of her one breached the surface, with its powerful jaws locked around the torso of a
man. He screamed a blood-curdling scream. The shark’s white underbelly flashed in the light of the flames as the creature smacked back down onto the surf, bringing its prey beneath the waves. She heard the man’s final scream, then he gurgled as he was dragged below. Suddenly she was aware that the fins were closing in on her. She let the cushion go and kept turning in the water, trying to see which one would close for an attack. A fin heading straight for her was hard to see, as it was just a thin line above the dawn’s dim-lit water. She braced herself. As the animal approached she punched down with all her might. She made contact with the nose of the killing machine and it flicked its tail and shimmied off, away from her. The punch cost her dearly. The pain in her arms almost knocked her out. There was another fin about twenty yards out coming around and in. She wouldn’t be able to muster that kind of punch again. She tried to position herself in the water to kick this one. Intellectually she knew this was a fight of attrition — she would not stop bleeding and they would not stop coming. She would be shark food as soon as her strength gave out or one blindsided her from the back or beneath. Then she looked to her right and thirty feet off was a capsized Zodiac. She started to swim toward it, but her arms were like lead and the best she could do was thrash around. The shark was coming right at her now. In a panic she looked to her left and saw the cushion bobbing only a few feet away. She screamed with every stroke from the searing pain that shot throughout her body as she swam to it. Brooke placed it under her chest again and kicked like the devil to make it to the upside-down rubber craft before the shark intercepted her. From the corner of her eye she saw the fin approaching as she was just feet from the boat and safety. The shark was closing too fast. She abandoned the cushion and started long strokes; it felt as if her arms were ripping out of their sockets. She was ready to give up and give in to the pain, which was so intense she started to hallucinate. She heard her brother, Harley’s, voice, “Don’t give up, Brooke. You can do it. Push harder! Come on, Brooke, work through the pain.” She yelled out of excruciating pain, “I can’t Harley, it hurts so much!”

  She heard him insist. “You won’t fail Brooke; you will make it. Don’t give in.” She screamed one more time and her hand touched the craft. She pulled herself up onto the slick bottom just as the shark struck. It took a huge bite out of the edge, a few inches from her dangling right foot. The impact threw her over the other side of the small, overturned boat. She went under and could see, in the dim rising-sun-lit surface, the shark trying to rip the severed piece of the boat free as it wiggled its powerful frame to shake it loose. Its small brain had not figured out yet that it wasn’t flesh, but foam-stuffed rubber. She scrambled back onto the hull of the boat one more time, centered herself and held on to the overturned prop of the outboard motor. Now she was the center of attention of at least eight sharks circling her little island.

  ∞§∞

  “Any word from Jakarta?” Agent Joey Palumbo asked as he entered the president’s Emergency Operations Center, putting his briefing file down on a nearby console.

  “No, sir, just the satellite confirmation of the explosion and fire aboard the Vera Cruz,” the satellite communications officer said.

  “Air-sea rescue?”

  “Scrambled from Diego Garcia, but it’s a long trip.”

  “Why didn’t we have assets in place closer?” Joey chided himself.

  “Whatever happened, sir, was unexpected,” the satellite down-link officer surmised.

  “Is the vessel still afloat?” Palumbo asked as he surveyed the screens and console panels of the PEOC. This was not the more famous situation room under the West Wing, but a converted World War II bunker off the East Wing basement of the White House.

  “All we know is that it stopped emanating the tracker signal… could be sunk or the tracker may have been discovered,” a tech manning a console said.

  Palumbo’s lean frame hovered over the multi-purpose console, his face locked except for the side-by-side movement of his square jaw as he chewed over his options. Bringing Brooke Burrell over from the FBI had been his initiative; she was the best and he wasn’t going to lose her to the Indian Ocean on her first mission attached to “Quarterback.” He set his jaw and he reached for a blue phone. “White House signals… this is Halfback, please voice print confirm… Halfback.”

  There were some switching sounds and then the voice of a female: “White House interconnect, state your emergency.”

  “I need to speak to CincPac immediately.”

  “Connecting.”

  A few seconds later a squeezed voice shot out of the receiver, after having been encoded, sent up 22,000 miles to Com Sat 7 — a military communications satellite — bounced off a dish in Virginia, then decoded and digitized and finally made analog to finish the trip on the oldest technology it would encounter, the electro-magnetic receiver element of a Bell System phone, circa 1966 that was against Joey’s ear. “Commander-In-Chief Pacific Fleet Operations…”

  “This is Joey Palumbo from special ops, White House, ‘pea-ock,’” Joey used the term for the PEOC to add a little more weight to the call, “do you have any ships at or near eight degrees twenty-nine minutes north at ninety-seven degrees thirty-eight minutes east?”

  ∞§∞

  Brooke’s head had cleared a bit as she assessed her situation. The overturned Zodiac she was clinging to was bobbing in the medium chop of sea south of Java. A body, face down, floated by. She recognized a rifle strap slung across its back and tugged it over. When she flipped the body over, half the man’s face was gone, along with the center of his chest. A slick and blood-red fish flipped and flapped out from behind the man’s lung and squirted back into the water, shedding its crimson covering and returning to its natural silver grey as it descended ahead of the red trail. She undid the sling and retrieved the AK-47. She then pushed the body off with her foot. Its motion attracted two sharks that immediately descended on the body and tore it in two. Other sharks started thrashing around the blood slick now marking the spot. Using the butt of the rifle as an oar of sorts, she started painfully paddling away from the sinking boat and, she hoped, from the sharks. The upside-down Zodiac presented so much drag that she wasn’t getting very far, but at least she was drifting away. The weighted-down end of the craft, with the overturned motor with its prop and small rudder pointing up, gave her a foothold against which she steadied herself as she stretched flat on the pitching raft. She told herself she’d rest a while and then see if she could right the boat. As she attempted to relax, all the pain returned, reporting in from her hands, her face, her knee — my knee? She looked down and there was a gash across her knee spewing blood. With hurting, bloodied hands, she ripped at the buttons of her blouse and removed it, then removed her bra. She wrapped the undergarment around her knee, and cinched it with a square knot made out of the straps. The under-wired cups snugly contoured to her knee. She checked that it was secure and donned the blouse again. It was waterlogged, and the back was bunched and twisted, but it afforded her some protection against the sun, which was starting to boil off the fog to the east.

  After an hour she gathered her strength, and with her right foot wedged in the crook between the craft and the motor shaft, and her other foot high on the propeller, she tugged at the top of the boat, trying to bend it back while at the same time applying her weight to the prop for leverage. She started to yank and buck her body in an attempt to overcome her own weight that was holding it down. After three hearty attempts, her foot slipped and she slid down and crashed into the shaft. Had she been a man, she would have seen stars. As it was, it made her gasp and immediately shot her mind back to when she had learned to ride her brother’s bike. She scrambled back to her original prone position on the little rubber continent, of which she was the sole inhabitant. Suddenly the boat was rocked by a collision. She looked around and there were sharks still keeping pace, one having just bumped the still upside-down Zodiac, as if to try to shake loose its prey. It was then she realized she was leavi
ng a blood trail, as her blood was running off the side of the boat. She tightened the straps of the bra around her knee to better stem the flow. Then she splashed water to clean the surface of the boat and break the trail of crimson she was leaving in her wake. She slung the rifle strap around her left arm just above her elbow and the butt on her right shoulder, then drew a bead on the closest fin. When it got as near as she thought it would, she dropped her sights and fired three shots into the body of the shark. It immediately thrashed and slapped in the water. The other sharks converged on the agitation and new blood in the water, and a feeding frenzy began. She drifted away from the school of sharks now busily devouring one of their own. She watched until she could no longer see the fins above the wave caps. Then she rested. She slept with her arm locked around the upright prop.

  ∞§∞

  The USS Nebraska, an Ohio-class Trident ballistic missile submarine, was the second ship in the Navy’s history to bear that name. Its current skipper, Bret “Mush” Morton was a third-generation Navy man whose submariner grandfather had distinguished himself in major battle actions in these very waters during a stretch from 1942 to 1944. Two years when, on a regular basis, ten boats would leave Pearl Harbor and only four would return. Those odds made that twenty-four-month span in World War II equal to a century of patrol in submarine years.