Free Passage Graves by Madyson Rush

shuffled madly through papers, pens, clips, the phone book. Where the hell was the gun?
    He grabbed a knife instead and hobbled along the counter to the window. All that remained of the sliding glass door was its thin aluminum frame. He peered through the opening, ready with the knife.
    The man was gone.

Chapter 18
    MONDAY 3:40 a.m.
    Stenness, Orkney Island, Scotland
     
    “This can’t be right,” Marek said, looking up from his computer as Thatcher entered the tent.
    She slumped in a chair between him and Bailey. Sitting was a luxury. Especially after an entire day of dissecting the Stenness remain s. “What is it?” she asked.
    M arek gestured to his screen. The monitor displayed a map of Stenness. A small icon shaped like Sonja blinked at the lower right corner. Another icon labeled “Stenness” was positioned at the middle. “Ballistics and Donovon entered all of our testing data—the dates and times we fired Sonja, the precise pitch and frequency.” He skimmed over the numbers, performing logarithms in his head. “There has to be an error.”
    “The numbers are right.” Bailey s cowled.
    “Well, according to our data, there’s no way in hell we did this,” Marek said.
    Thatcher sat up.
    Marek pointed at the small Sonja icon on his screen. “This is our test site.” He moved his mouse cursor over the symbol. The Sonja symbol exploded. “Bam,” he said. “We’ve got ourselves 160 dB of low-frequency infrasound.”
    A rippling effect of curved oblong sound waves moved outward from Sonja across the map and into the village.
    “That’s only enough noise to cause mild tissue heating, nausea, intestinal pain,” Thatcher agreed. “It would have to be bigger.”
    “W e never fired anything bigger,” Marek said.
    Bailey nodded at the screen as he chewed on his pen. “ What if our settings were off…take her up a notch.”
    “Crank Sonja up to 200 dB and 2.5 kH,” Marek said. “That’s a whole lotta noise…”
    “Enough to kill,” Thatcher said.
    The Sonja icon enlarged and exploded, sending waves toward Stenness.
    “Sound lessens in intensity the further it moves away from its source,” Marek said. “Sonja was 8 km southeast of Stenness, so…”
    “W e’re still not talking death,” Bailey said.
    “J ust a lot of discomfort Pepto-Bismol can’t fix,” Marek said. “Our test site is too far away.”
    “What if we let her go at full power?” Bailey asked.
    Thatcher turned to him, surprised.
    Bailey leaned back in his chair. “Hypotheti cally.”
    Marek added the new configuration into the program. “If Sonja dumps payload…”
    The map refreshed with the Sonja icon twice as big. It burst, unleashing a much larger acoustic wave.
    “That’s 250 dB and 30 kH,” Marek said. “We’re mimicking a high yield, non-nuclear explosion. Pretty damn close to the power of an atomic “bunker buster” warhead.”
    Thatcher watched the sound waves radiate across Stenness.
    “The blast woul d be lethal to a range of 50 km,” he said. “Instantaneous combustion, zero survivors.”
    Her stomach knotted. “Exactly what I saw in the bodies I examined.”
    God, could the whole bloody atrocity be on her head? She faced Bailey. “Tell me you and Golke did not fire that cannon.”
    “What are you going on about?” Bailey still had the nerve to play dumb.
    Thatcher put two and two together. Lee had mentioned Bailey and Golke were alone with the weapon at the time of the explosion. Were these idiots really daft enough to fire Sonja at maximum power? “Did you detonate at full capacity without my authorization?”
    “I said hypothetically!” Bailey insisted, his face turning red.
    Thatcher glared at him. Bailey was a bad liar.
    “Nobody said we couldn’t fire her at threshold!” Bailey leaned further back in his chair, a juvenile effort to appear defiant. His eyes betrayed him, and he suddenly looked very young.
    Thatcher shook her head. Like Lee, Bailey had been an outspoken dissenter of