The Titicaca Effect Read online

  The Titicaca Effect

  By

  Richard N. Tooker

  THE TITICACA EFFECT

  An enormous antigravity field erupts into being over Lake Titicaca in the high Andes and promises to forever change mankind’s access to earth orbit and deep space beyond. American FAA investigator Tyler Freeman and scientist Dr. Thaddeus Stout investigate the mysterious disappearance of an airliner brought down by the phenomenon and become emmeshed in a web of danger, geopolitical intrique and terrorism as Bolivia fights to retain control of its incredible new natural resource.

  The Titicaca Effect is a compelling science fiction story, a rousing political thriller and a lively adventure, all in one arresting novel you won’t be able to put down.

  www.titicaca-effect.com

  © Copyright 2004 Richard N. Tooker

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.

  ISBN 9781617505102

  Contents

  Chapter 1: The Effect

  Chapter 2: La Paz

  Chapter 3: The President

  Chapter 4: The Takeover

  Chapter 5: The Briefing

  Chapter 6: The Dinner Party

  Chapter 7: The Experiment

  Chapter 8: Washington

  Chapter 9: Alicia

  Chapter 10: Planning an Invasion

  Chapter 11: The Explanation

  Chapter 12: Larry King Live

  Chapter 13: The White House

  Chapter 14: Doomsday

  Chapter 15: Encounter

  Chapter 16: Testing

  Chapter 17: The Astronaut

  Chapter 18: The Auction

  Chapter 19: Janey

  Chapter 20: Ready to Launch

  Chapter 21: Condor One

  Chapter 22: Condor Two

  Chapter 23: Into Space

  Chapter 1: The Effect

  The old man eased his boat off the bank and into the waters of the great blue lake. As he had done nearly every morning for the last 60-plus years, he slowly poled the boat away from the shore. Today he was prepared to row the three miles toward Isla De La Luna, the Island of the Moon.

  The waters near the shoreline of the smaller of the two islands offshore were a favorite spot, and he hoped the fishing would be better today. Perhaps he would catch a salmon in addition to the usual lake trout.

  It was early and still cold on the altiplano, but there was no wind to disturb the surface of the lake, which made the long trip more pleasant.

  As he neared the island, the old man stopped rowing just long enough to eat some goat cheese and drink from the cold, clear waters of Lago Titicaca. He was very near his destination, and he scanned the horizon for signs of the hydrofoils that sometimes carried tourists to see the ruins of the ancient ones. Thankfully, the noisy boats usually disgorged their passengers on the larger of the two islands more than a mile away, leaving his favorite fishing spot undisturbed. He saw no sign of the boats, but peered intently at the surface of the lake near his final destination. Something wasn’t right.

  Even though there was still no wind, nearly 200 yards of the water’s surface had begun to churn where it should have been still, and it bulged upward visibly near the center of the agitation. Small waves were breaking on the rocks at the island’s edge. Cautiously, he used a paddle to move the boat forward slowly. Such a disturbance might indicate the presence of fish, but if so it would be the largest school of fish he had ever seen. As he neared the disturbance he could hear a high-pitched hissing sound, and the air above the churning water began refracting the image of the mountains in the distance as if it were a great lens of some kind. Suddenly a snake-like, thrashing stream of water sprang from the surface of the lake, followed within seconds by a gigantic waterspout and a deafening roar. At the same time, the boat began accelerating as if it had a mind of its own. Startled, the old man tried to stop it, but his paddling had no effect. The boat was picking up speed as it neared the disturbance, in spite of his now-frantic efforts to halt it. Within seconds, the boat began to break up. Arms and legs flailing, the old man screamed in terror as both he and the wreckage of his boat left the surface of the great lake and shot straight upward, gaining speed and altitude simultaneously.

  The last thing the old man experienced before he died was the roar of the wind, the intense cold of the earth’s stratosphere, and the sight of his homeland from more than five miles up.

  * * *

  “American 291, this is La Paz control. Turn right to one-nine-zero and descend to 20,000.”

  “God, I love this airport,” the co-pilot said with a smile. “Where else in the world do you land at full throttle?”

  “That’s why the runway is a half-mile longer than the one at Logan,” the pilot responded. “You have to overcompensate on practically everything they teach you in training to land at this altitude.” He nosed the aircraft down and started the right turn the tower had asked for. The co-pilot picked up the intercom microphone and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have begun our final descent to La Paz’s El Alto airport. Those of you with window seats should have a good view of Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the Americas. Please fasten your seat belts for the duration of the flight. We are about 50 miles out, and should be landing in about ten minutes.”

  Behind the flight deck, the flight attendants were walking the center aisle picking up the last of the cups and napkins, and making sure that the passengers had complied with the request to buckle up, turn off electronic devices, raise tray tables and sit up straight before landing. Passengers with window seats were gaping at the spectacular view of the lake immediately below, the high plain surrounding it, and the immense Andes in the distance.

  The plane disintegrated.

  No warning lights, nothing on the radar, not a cloud in the sky, no malfunction detected, it ran into a wall of water that suddenly appeared seconds before it intersected the plane’s flight path. When the plane hit the water, it ripped apart as if a giant hand had swatted it from the sky. Some of the wreckage headed for the waters of the lake below, but most of it, along with all the passengers, shot upward toward the cold of space.

  Chapter 2: La Paz

  Tyler Freeman stood impatiently outside the security area, anxiously scanning the crowd of deplaning passengers for a glimpse of Thaddeus Stout. He looked out of place. At a lanky 6’2”, he was a full head taller, maybe two, than anyone else in the gate area, and was the only black man in the airport. He also looked underdressed in faded jeans, hiking boots, and a beat-up leather jacket that had obviously seen years of tough duty.

  While he waited, Freeman idly surveyed the airport waiting area. He saw nothing unusual, just the usual collection of Bolivians, about half of them of Spanish descent. The others were Indians descended from the original inhabitants of the high plain. Not surprising to Freeman, all the airport laborers seemed to be Indians.

  Freeman frowned. Haves and have-nots. Light years apart and probably generations away from correction, he thought. Being black made him unusually sensitive to societal classes, even though he himself had spent most of his life in a largely non-prejudicial environment. His father had been an Air Force officer, and Tyler had followed in his footsteps. But while the elder Freeman had been an office worker, Tyler had become a fighter pilot, and a damn good one. At one time, he had even been considered for the astronaut corps at NASA, but he had not been accepted into that program, the single most disappointing event in his life. He had played spaceman as a child, and had nourished the dream of being an astronaut through his teens and into adulthood. But it wasn
’t to be. He never wanted to be a commercial pilot, so after he was discharged from the air force he went back to school and earned a doctorate in meteorology from Cal State. He worked as a TV weatherman in Texas for a short time before he landed a job at the FAA. His five-year experience as a pilot and his doctorate in meteorology made him uniquely suited to investigate air disasters.

  He was also extraordinarily good with people and with the management of complex processes, which made him particularly adept at working within a bureaucracy. Blessed with a natural curiosity and cursed with an obsession to solve mysteries, he had quickly become one of the FAA’s top investigators, with a reputation for finding the reasons for a crash quickly, and he had never been proved wrong.

  He loved his work almost to a fault, which was one of the reasons his early-30’s marriage had come to an end. His job required him to be somewhere else most of the time, working around the clock. His ex had never quite gotten used to it, and on his 40th birthday, had filed for divorce. She had gotten custody of their eight-year-old daughter Janey, who had grown up, for all practical purposes, without a father. Freeman felt as if he had never really gotten to know his daughter, and he wrestled daily with an almost overpowering guilt about that. He was never really comfortable around Janey, which made his infrequent visits to see her an ordeal. But he wasn’t about to quit doing the work that defined his life, and his response to the trauma of the divorce had been to burrow even deeper into his career. Two years later, he found himself in Bolivia working on the most challenging assignment of his career, and he was enjoying every minute of it.

  He was struck by the fact that he seemed to be the only black man in Bolivia. Under the best of circumstances, he was a curiosity in this country. The stares he received wherever he went had been disconcerting when he had first arrived more than two weeks earlier, and had taken some getting used to. And even though he had asked countless times, he had never received a satisfactory answer as to why there didn’t seem to be any blacks in Bolivia.

  Since the stares seemed to reflect only surprise and curiosity instead of prejudice or hostility, he had learned to brush them off. In some ways, his very uniqueness in this country was an asset. Certainly, no one took him for granted. As a result, he usually got things done, and when he was dealing with the government bureaucracy, the ability to cut through red tape was important.

  Still, the plight of the Bolivian natives troubled him deeply. These people were dirt poor.

  As he waited, he could see a U.S. Air Force C5A cargo plane unloading equipment on the tarmac outside. Two jeeps and assorted size crates had already been taken off the giant aircraft and workers were continuing to unload additional crates. He could hear the popping sound of a helicopter landing, but couldn’t see it from his vantage point inside the terminal. “Good’” he thought. “We need this equipment. But where are the boats?”

  “Thad!” Freeman shouted and waved when he spied his old friend coming through the gate. “Welcome to the land of thin air!”

  Thaddeus Stout leaned against the railing where he stood, not moving except for the rapid rise and fall of his chest as his lungs attempted to wring some oxygen out of what little atmosphere there seemed to be. He was a much shorter man than Tyler Freeman, and he wasn’t dressed much better. Goateed, bookish and rumpled, he looked more like a slightly over-the-hill wrestler than a scientist. His discomfort was obvious.

  “Thin?” he gasped. “This isn’t thin. It’s a goddamn vacuum!”

  Freeman grinned. “Relax. First-timers always have trouble adjusting to the altitude. You’ll feel better after I get the local folk remedy down you.”

  “I may not survive long enough to get through customs. The only reason I even want to live is so that I can strangle you. Bolivia, for God’s sake! Who the hell goes to Bolivia?” Stout scowled as a policeman motioned for him to go through a doorway and into the immigration/customs area.

  Same old Thad, Freeman thought. He took a chair in the waiting area where Stout would wind up when the customs officers were through with him, settling down for a long wait. He knew that customs would take some time, especially given Stout’s mood. His friend was not in the habit of taking direction from others, not a good thing when going through customs. Bolivian customs officers take their jobs very seriously, and people with an attitude usually get the full treatment.

  Freeman had met Thaddeus Stout in Amarillo, Texas, where he had spent nearly two years as a TV weatherman. Stout was the chief chemist at the government’s helium storage facility near the city, and they had met at a symposium on supercells and tornados that Freeman had given to the local civil defense officials charged with handling the yearly threatening weather events that are a natural by-product of being located in the heart of “tornado alley,” a geographic region in the U.S. heartland that regularly spawns the deadly storms.

  Freeman had thought it odd that a chemist would have enough interest in weather phenomena to attend such a meeting, and had purposely approached Stout during one of the coffee breaks to find out why. When he learned that the scientist was simply curious, enough to give up a Saturday to learn something new outside his discipline, he was intrigued. He made it a point to exchange business cards with Stout and over the next few months the two men struck up a solid friendship. What he liked about Stout was the fact that the man was neither left-brained nor right-brained. Instead, he was both analytical and creative – whole brained – which made the two of them more alike than most people. They had one of those rare relationships that starts out based on mutual respect and becomes one between kindred spirits

  Since Freeman had joined the FAA, he had used Stout’s talents on several occasions when the cause of a crash eluded him and required unconventional thinking to solve – just the kind of challenge that Stout loved. The scientist had expanded his field of interest to include physics, biology, higher mathematics, computer programming, and even archaeology. And unlike most people who have such wide-ranging interests, he was good, even world-class, at all of them.

  They had helped each other over some rough spots, too, which only helped to make their bond stronger. When Stout’s wife died in an automobile accident, it was Freeman who helped him get through the grief. And Stout had reciprocated when Freeman’s marriage went on the rocks. They were more like brothers than friends.

  “Are you just going to sit there daydreaming while my life ebbs away?” To Freeman’s surprise, his friend reappeared within minutes. “Whatever that folk remedy is, I want it now.” Stout had cleared customs, and he still looked pretty bad.

  “Mate de coca,” Freeman said. “You need tea made from coca leaves. It tastes like dishwater, but short of catching the next plane to a lower altitude, it’s the fastest way to get relief. We can get some in the coffee shop.” He escorted a wheezing Stout up the stairs to the airport coffee shop and ordered the tea. Stout said nothing while they waited. He looked like he was in real pain.

  “Sometimes you get a migraine,” Freeman sympathized, “or something that feels very much like one.”

  “I’ve never had a migraine,” Stout grumbled, “and if this is what one feels like, I hope I never do. This tea had better work.” He glanced around the coffee shop. “Christ! These people look like they’re straight out of the 1950s.”

  Freeman reached in his coat pocket and extracted some pills he had brought for Stout. “These might help you get through the worst of it. This medication will speed your heart rate and increase your blood pressure. Not something you’d want to take at sea level, but up here it helps a little.

  “What I need is oxygen,” Stout said.

  “There’s a full bottle waiting for you in your hotel room at the Radisson,” Freeman responded. “And drink the coca tea without sugar.”

  The waiter showed up with the tea and Stout drank it gratefully, and then ordered more. He didn’t seem to be feeling any better. “Coca leaves? Don’t they make cocaine from those? Is this stuff legal?”

  Freeman nod
ded, then laughed. “It would take about thirty gallons of that tea to give you a real buzz. Your kidneys would give out first.”

  Stout had already finished his second cup and was pouring a third. “I still don’t know why I’m here. This had better be good. One minute I’m basking in the sun on vacation in Florida, and the next I’m on a plane to a country I couldn’t locate on a map until today. All your office would tell me was that it was a matter of ‘utmost urgency,’ and I’ve encountered you civil servants often enough to know that could mean any of a dozen things, none of which are actually urgent. Certainly not important enough to change hemispheres for. I read about the American crash and the waterspout, so I gather that’s why you’re here. But what does the FAA need with a chemist? What gives, Ty?”

  “Not here,” Freeman responded. “I’ll fill you in later.” He waved in the direction of the doorway, where a frowning Bolivian soldier carrying an automatic rifle stood. “Ready to go?”

  “With him? He doesn’t look very friendly. Do we really need an armed escort? Where’s my luggage?”

  “Already taken care of. And no, we don’t need an armed escort, but that’s the only kind the Bolivian government has. Feeling better?