The First Casualty by Gregg Loomis

a light the like of which I had never before seen” before she died in his hands. He took this as an omen of his own death.
    As idiosyncratic as he might be, he was compelling when seeking investors for his inventions. J. P. Morgan put $250,000, a fortune by the standards of the day, into a scheme by which Tesla would use the ionosphere and the earth’s electromagnetic field as a giant transformer to power all forms of transportation worldwide. When he returned to the noted financier seeking additional money for the project, he made the mistake of telling the famously conservative banker how his invention would make the nations of the world one. Morgan was horrified and additional funding was not forthcoming.
    Several of Tesla’s inventions had a decided dark side. The electromechanical oscillator so enjoyed by Mark Twin could, according to its inventor, destroy the Brooklyn Bridge in a matter of minutes. Given several days, it could “split the earth in two like halves of an apple.” When skeptics pointed out a number of flaws in his claim, Tesla replied he could at least “peel the surface of the earth away, which would serve to destroy mankind just as completely.”
    Another was his so-called “Death Ray,” the stuff of which comic-book supervillains are made. In 1937, he described it thus to a New York Times reporter: “It will send a concentrated­ beam of particles: through the free air of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 airplanes at a distance of 250 miles from the defending nation and will cause enemy millions to drop dead in their tracks.”
    Since light trends to diffuse over distance and the concentrated beam of the laser was still in the future, the “ray” was to consist of tiny particles of mercury charged with more than one million volts of electricity sprayed into the air from towers by means of a special nozzle that resealed itself to maintain the vacuum necessary to eject the mercury particles. This device was never patented, if indeed it ever existed, so we do not know how the nozzle both sprayed particulate matter and maintained a vacuum. We do know that both the U.S. military and Great Britain declined to purchase the device. The Soviet Union paid Tesla $25,000 for the plans. Had the Soviets succeeded in manufacturing the machine, World War II would have come to an earlier conclusion.
    The author made considerable effort to find existing evidence of the “Death Ray,” if it existed, including reviewing the microfiche documents in the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia, some 155,000 in all, including almost 70,000 bits of correspondence both personal and business and more than 45,000 papers of scientific content. The Nikola Tesla Museum of Science in Colorado Springs, Colorado, contains re-creations of a number of the man’s inventions, including the oscillator. It also has copies of his journals, which are infuriatingly incomplete. No mention of the “Death Ray” was found.

22
    Somewhere in the Croatian Countryside
    Sixty-Two Minutes Later
    Natalia had been right: It seemed to Jason the train stopped almost before it got going from the last stop. From what he could see, it stopped at groupings of a few wooden houses or in empty country. He rarely saw passengers get on or off, but he did note livestock—sheep, horses, goats—seemed to grow more numerous as the train progressed ever upward. He was certain the animals’ interest in the train increased in direct proportion to the steepness of the grade. It was as if they were curious as to whether the engine would make it to the top of the next hill.
    At first, he noticed snow in patches, most in the shade of groves of trees. Then there was more white than the brown winter grass. Within minutes, they were crossing a white mountain meadow, the bottom of a bowl created by the snowcapped Dinaric Alps. Jason wondered if he could capture the subtle