These are the kind of strange things that pop into my head on a pretty frequent basis. Some of these make it into books as small scenes while most of them get discarded but this one became the genesis of an entire novel. I couldn’t get the image out of my head so I had to come up with something to get Mercer on one vehicle and the villain on the other. How I was going to pull that off I had no idea. Meanwhile I was tinkering with an idea I’d wanted to touch on for a while -- the famed 1908 Tunguska blast over Siberia. As I researched the event I learned that witnesses claim part of the object skipped off the atmosphere and continued on a westerly course. Tracing the route on a map showed it was conceivable part of the object could have hit Greenland.

What the hell, I thought Mercer had just spent time in the desert, why not send him to the Arctic.

Researching Greenland led me to the US Army’s Project Iceworm, a Cold War scheme to locate nuclear missiles under the ice. The elements were coming together. Mercer could be in Greenland to investigate an abandoned Iceworm base (to get him to go I invented the Surveyor’s Society, which while it hasn’t reappeared in subsequent books most likely will). Once there he can discover a piece of the Tunguska meteorite. And then I thought, so what! Who cares about a hundred year old inert rock? And how does this get me to my blimp/sub tug-of-war?

The last piece of the puzzle was to give the meteorite exotic radioactive properties. That’s when research really paid off. The scientist who did the first field research at the Tunguska blast site, Leonid Kulik, died as a prisoner of war in a Nazi camp. What if Kulik knew about the radioactivity and told his captors? Wouldn’t they have sent an expedition to recover as much of the meteorite as they could? Voila a secret Nazi submarine base carved under the Greenland ice sheet. The blimp was the easy part. Heavy-lift airships for hauling cargo to remote locations have been on the drawing boards for years.

As for a villain, made sense to me that a German company still in business today would do anything to make sure nothing of their Nazi past ever came to light, especially with the topic of reparations a hotly contested one. For an added twist I included an order of Russian monks who had been tasked by Rasputin himself to hide all evidence of the deadly radioactivity and whose work continues today. It took two solid months of research to pull all this together but just three days to write a fifteen page outline.