The Shield: a novel

This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, real locales, businesses and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

C
opyright © 2014 Nachman Kataczinsky. All rights reserved

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

First printing: 2014

ISBN-13:
978-1499630541
ISBN-10: 1499630549
BISAC: Fiction / Science Fiction / Time Travel

Rank Armor Publishing
www.rankarmor.com
 

Printed in the United States of America

To my wife Minda -

You are my inspiration
and a great editor.

In memory of my parents who survived the real horrors and
in memory of those who did not.

Professor Wisotzky was in a difficult position: how do you tell your most gifted student and research assistant that his latest idea was crazy?

“Arye, what you propose is impossible. Your equations are strange and the whole thing is a waste of time. Let’s continue with your thesis
.
It is much more productive.”

Arye Kidron was prepared for a skeptical or even hostile response to his presentation and was not discouraged. Yitzhak Wisotzky was a highly respected physicist and professor at the Physics department of the Technion, Israel’s most prestigious university. But at 64 years of age he was not as open to new ideas as he might have been thirty years earlier.  Arye
, on the other hand, was bursting with new concepts and at age 32 was eager to do something new. His doctoral thesis was moderately interesting, but this new idea was a bomb.

“
Yitzhak, please take at least some time to check my calculations. Shouldn’t take you more than an hour. If you find a serious error, I promise to shut up about this.”

“
Sure you will, until the next great idea, and anyway, I did go through them already. There are two constants you assume – these are vital to your calculation of quantum vacuum energy. If you are wrong, the whole thing is worthless.”

“
You’re not saying that I am wrong though?”  Arye was smiling. He knew his old teacher: If something was seriously wrong with his theory, Yitzhak Wisotzky would say so up front and not have this whole discussion. There was hope yet!

“
I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but we have no proof that you are right either.”

“
So, why not set up an experiment and see?”

“
Because we don’t have the money to do that. It would take your salary for the next ten years.”

That was a
very
good sign. The old professor had an estimate of the cost of an experiment that agreed with his own. Maybe they could find the money.

***

“Gadi, it is time to go. You promised to be at the Technion not later than 1600 hours.” Lieutenant General Gad Yaari got up from behind his desk, stretched and smiled at his secretary. His compact,
lean frame did not show how tired he was; his angular face betrayed some of the exhaustion, but not much. At 52 he was in good physical shape and was used to working around the clock, if necessary, and under a lot of pressure. Not having slept much in the past several nights did not help but was bearable. What was much more difficult to deal with was the task he was given by the government: to protect Israel from a possible nuclear attack. A preventive strike was an option, but one the government really did not like. Lately Gadi was devoting a lot of his time to this problem. He looked forward to some sleep and the hour and a half drive to Haifa would offer that opportunity. Except he had to catch up on some paperwork.

“
OK, Liat. Let’s go. Please take the stuff I need to work on, especially that combat readiness analysis.”

Major Liat Cohen nodded. She had worked as Gadi’s assistant since he was the Commanding General of the Southern Command, and that was more than six years ago. She knew him well and anticipated his requests. He never used orders with her, though it was just his style of doing things, and nobody who knew him, even superficially, would ever contemplate not obeying his polite “requests”.

In the car Gadi read and signed operational reports and tried to read a long analysis of reserve troop training and operational readiness. He fell asleep in the middle of it. Liat did not wake him until they arrived at the Physics building of the Technion Institute of Technology Mount Carmel campus.

***

“Shalom, Gadi. Good to see you again.”

Professor Wisotzky smiled. He had liked Gad Yaari in his student days. Yaari had been interested in physics even though budding electronics engineers like him usually did not mix with theoretical physics. Wisotzky also appreciated Gadi’s selflessness, or maybe it should be called patriotism. Gadi had a promising civilian career ahead of him but had decided to re-enlist. The almost national disaster of the latest war convinced him that he was needed by his country. He had also devoted time to convincing others to re-enlist. He was not successful with Arye Kidron, who was immersed too deeply in his strange quantum world.

“Shalom, Professor. Shalom, Arye.”

“
Hi, Chief,” Kidron responded.

“
Anything interesting for me to see today?”

The professor nodded at Arye, “It’s your show, so go ahead.”

Liat looked at her watch. “Please be as brief as possible. The Chief has to leave in about forty minutes.”

Arye Kidron gathered his thoughts for a moment. “We started this experiment as a proof of a theory that could lead to a supply of cheap and abundant Zero Point Energy, you know, quantum vacuum energy.”

“I didn’t think this theory was ever proven,” remarked Gad Yaari.

“
That was the point of designing an experiment that would prove Arye’s newest idea. I have to admit that this one seems less insane than his other endeavors,” added Professor Wisotzky with a smile.

“
Anyway, a funny thing happened on the way to get energy from vacuum. I’m not sure that our benefactors at the Ministry of Industry and Infrastructure will be happy, but we may yet get there,” Arye continued. “As it happens, I hope I found a way to make this project attractive to you. Then we’ll classify it as Top Secret and the money guys will never bother us again.”

Yaari smiled: “I can’t agree unless you show me what it is that I
am supposed to hide behind a curtain of military secrecy.”

“
OK. Here goes.”

Arye led them to the far end of the lab. On a simple Formica office desk a rabbit was loudly munching on lettuce, blinking at the visitors through the chicken wire of his cage. Behind the desk was a thick block of wood. Arye placed a two inch translucent cube at each of the four bottom corners of the cage and a similar but opaque cube on top. A pair of wires was attached to the top cube. He withdrew a .22 caliber pistol from a drawer.

“Chief, it is quite predictable what will happen to this rabbit if I shoot it with this gun. Even I can’t miss at point blank range. Now watch.”

He pushed a button on a box that was connected to the wires from the cube and plugged into a wall outlet. The translucent cubes lit up with a rainbow of colors and disappeared. Yaari thought that the rabbit shimmered for a split second, but that could have been an illusion.

Arye Kidron carefully aimed his gun, though at a distance of one foot it was hardly necessary, and fired it into the rabbit. The animal did not even blink and kept working on his lettuce. The bullet was lodged in the wood directly behind it. Kidron extended the gun to the General. “If you’d like to try it yourself...”

Yaari took the small Beretta and fired the rest of the rounds in the magazine. The rabbit was still chewing.

“Assuming this is not a simple magician’s trick, what happened just now?”

Arye pushed the button again. The translucent cubes popped out of thin air and were again at the corners of the cage. Another push of the button, and they disappeared again. Another push and they reappeared.

“Every time I push the button and the cubes disappear, they and the space enclosed by them go slightly out of phase with our space. I am not entirely sure why we can still see the rabbit, but the guy seems to be unaffected by the field. He stays out of phase until a second pulse pushes him back into our reality. As long as he is out of phase he cannot be harmed by anything we do. He can do nothing to us either. You may notice that we even don’t hear him munching on the lettuce.”

The Chief of General Staff stayed at the lab for much longer than his planned forty minutes. He did not get much sleep that night either, but when he finally went to bed he slept like a rock. He was awakened the next evening by his wife Yael.

“Liat is on the line. She says it’s urgent.”

Yael never asked why things were urgent and what the callers wanted. After thirty years of marriage she knew that her husband had a burden that only he could carry. There would be no sharing of his professional life.

“Chief, the Prime Minister will see you in two hours.”

Am
os Nir woke up suddenly. Even though many years had passed since he had served in the Special Forces, he still had the ability to come up from a deep sleep in an instant. He was in his late fifties, a tall, thin, man with a full head of grey hair and an even temperament. He was relatively new to politics – his youth had been spent in the armed forces. In his early thirties he quit the service and continued his education in history and political science, while working as a manager at a financial firm. By the time he decided that Israeli politics needed to be managed somewhat better, his three children, two sons and a daughter were past their army service and he himself
was 46. Amos joined the center-right party and due to his charismatic personality and leadership abilities rose quickly through the organization. It took him close to ten years to become the leader of his party, and two years ago, when the party won an election and formed a coalition government, he became Prime Minister.

The telephone was ringing. The
red
phone. He looked at his bedside clock – three in the morning. Who was calling at this ungodly hour? These days he slept much better and was not as stressed out as he had been only a year ago. The coalition was stable and, except for the usual political squabbling and maneuvering, everything was quiet. It was his third year
as Prime Minister and he no longer had to anticipate a nuclear war. Now if it happened they had The Shield.

“
Yes, Amos speaking.”

“
Mr. Prime Minister,” said Gad Yaari, “the Shield has been activated. I already told the Defense Minister.”

“
Come to my house now.  I’ll call the other members of the Defense Cabinet.” Amos Nir hung up the phone and after a short pause called his secretary.

“
Moshe, contact the members of the Defense Cabinet and tell them to come to my house now. Some will give you a hard time at three in the morning. Just tell them that I expect them within thirty minutes. If anybody asks questions, tell them that this is the Prime Minister’s order.”

The secretary knew better than to ask any questions himself. Something important must have happened for the Defense Cabinet to be called to a meeting so early in the morning. It was only the second time in his long service as the Prime Minister’s secretary that a P
.M. issued an order to the Defense Cabinet. This could not be good.

“
Lady and gentlemen,” Amos said when everybody was seated at his dining table, “I am sorry to have you come here so early. We have a problem that can’t wait.  We need to decide very soon what to do. I will let the Chief of General Staff brief you first
.
”

The five members of the Defense Cabinet included the Ministers of Defense, Finance, Foreign Affairs, Industry/Infrastructure and Internal Security. Everyone was equipped by now with a cup of coffee (tea in the case of the Industry Minister) and ready to listen.

“Moshe, please leave us. There will be no minutes taken of this meeting.” Moshe Ashkenazi, the PM’s secretary, left the room and closed the door behind him.

“
Gadi, go ahead
.
”

“
All of you know about the David’s Shield project. It was completed about eight months ago and tested for the duration of about five seconds. At the time, we judged that such a short activation would go unnoticed. We were right. A little before two forty in the morning our radar picked up a ballistic missile launch from the Tabriz area in Iran. It was traveling in our direction. The Arrow system picked it up about three hundred kilometers northeast of our border with Syria and predicted its point of impact somewhere in the western Galilee, in the Haifa area. At that point in time, an Arrow missile was launched to intercept. Interception occurred about fifty kilometers northeast of the Syrian border, twenty kilometers south of Damascus. The missile was destroyed. The Shield system picked up an increase in gamma emissions
and activated. We are now analyzing the radiation data and should know within ten minutes, ” He looked at his watch. “No, about now - if the levels are safe. As far as we can tell it is safe but we will know…”

The telephone rang.
Amos picked it up, listened and gave the receiver to the general.

“
Yaari here.”

“
Gadi, we are done with the system data analysis. The missile was destroyed far enough away not to pose a danger to our most outlying positions. It did not detonate, but radioactive materials it was carrying were probably dispersed over an area large enough to trigger the Shield. It should be safe to turn the Shield off.” The Chief of Military Intelligence paused. He obviously had something else to say. Yaari waited patiently. Zvi Kaplan had an exceptional intuition for the unusual. He could see patterns where others would often miss them.