Medusa's Child

TWENTY-ONE

General Kinney, head of the Air Force Combat Command, sat on the corner of the communications console in the command post and listened to the latest assembled intelligence. Located near the War Room, the Air Force facility was festooned with video monitors, telephones, maps, and intense young enlisted personnel working side by side with a cross-section of officers on a dizzying variety of assignments. A sandy-haired Air Force major in a perfectly pressed uniform stood ramrod-straight before the general, a sheaf of papers in his hand as he snapped out the facts he'd been asked to provide.

"The KC-10 carrying the two pilots who can fly the 727 will reach the airfield first, sir. The C-141 will be a few minutes behind them, and the second KC-10 about ten minutes after that with the radio gear for the pacemaker."

"And the F-16's?"

"They're approaching Grand Strand right now. We still don't have a radar track on ScotAir, but the coordinates he gave us show him here." The major pointed to a spot on an aeronautical chart spread out before them. "They'll get there about the time the C-141 arrives."

"The 141 crew knows they'll have only a ten-minute window to get that K-Loader positioned?"

"Yes, sir. They say their loadmasters swear they can do it. They said they'll have to break every procedural rule they have, but they can do it."

"Let's hope they're right. When that bomb's countdown hits forty minutes, they've got to be airborne, whether it's the 141 or the 727."

"If it's the 141, sir, it'll be awfully tight. At top speed they'll be able to cover only about a hundred and sixty miles before dumping, and they'll need every minute to race back west to avoid the blast."

General Kinney got to his feet and motioned the Secretary of the Air Force toward the command post's Starsuite for another update.

Alerted an hour before by a frightened colleague in Washington, the senior scientist who was once responsible for providing the administrative support for Rogers Henry's Medusa Project frantically pulled the third of four aging file boxes from a closet in his den and rifled through the folders in search of one that was little more than a vague image in his memory. It had been, what, twenty years? Perhaps longer, he mused, since the last impassioned plea for reinstatement of the Medusa Project had arrived from Dr. Rogers Henry in Miami.

He had never opened it because he'd known what was inside: more pleas, more theoretical musings, many of them crossing the line into classified information. The others he'd seen had to be burned, and each time Rogers had been warned sternly about writing down ideas and postulations that were the top secret property of a government that refused to let him complete his research.

Nothing! He slid the lid back in place and reached for the last box. It had to be there.

Logically, he knew, there was probably nothing in the folder that would shed any light on what Rogers Henry had apparently built and somehow deployed two years after his death, but he had to know. His friend in Washington was frightened of what would happen if the military tried to dispose of the weapon.

"Is it possible," the friend had asked, "that somewhere in the files Rogers might have left a clue about the trigger he's used?"

At last the folder popped into view, thick with papers and yellow with age. He yanked it from its cardboard sarcophagus and stood up, aware of his protesting knees and a sudden lightheaded feeling. As much as he loved Santa Fe and its constant autumn tinge of sweet pinon pine burning softly in a thousand fireplaces, he would never get used to the seven-thousand-foot altitude.

He moved quickly to his easy chair and plunked down, his fingers working at the unbreached seal on the package Rogers Henry had sent so long ago. There was another package inside, another folder, this one sealed with what aviators called speed tape, a heavy aluminum tape used on the exteriors of aircraft. It yielded after several attempts to peel it back, and he pulled the forty or so pages out and placed them on his lap as he fumbled for his reading glasses.

"You must tell me in a call or a letter or some form of positive contact if you read this!" Rogers had written. "If you don't make contact, I'll assume you have not seen it, and I'll proceed accordingly."

What the hell does that mean? he wondered. Strange that Henry somehow knew I might not read anything more.

Time had dimmed the memory of their exchanges. Perhaps he had told Rogers that nothing more would be read.

The letter's first page rehashed old territory, but on the second page Rogers had laid out in detail a series of formulas and calculations laced with physical drawings of a strange design. He looked closer, realizing with a sudden thrill that it was, indeed, a form of nuclear trigger, and a radical departure from the traditional models that…

"Oh my God!"

The seventy-two-year-old scientist grabbed for the phone and fumbled with the number he'd written down.

The number rang four times before it was answered.

"Max?"

"Yeah."

"You were right. Louis here, in Santa Fe. Rogers sent me the plans for this thing twenty years ago. I never opened it. Max, you're right. It's the one he talked about."

"Slow down, Louis. You mean an instant trigger?"

"Yes, yes! Put high explosives around it, no matter how close you get, this thing creates an instant critical mass. You can't defeat it that way."

"I thought so. I'd better try to get through to the Pentagon. I know some people over there."

"Max, there's something else, though. And they need to know this immediately."

"Go ahead."

"Looking at his diagram, there's one vulnerability to the trigger that can be defeated easily, if they have the right equipment. Forget explosives, forget timers. Block the magnetic neutrality of the mechanism with a large magnetic field, and it can't work."

"A magnetic field? How large?"

"You know the size of the electromagnets used in junk yards to pick up scrap metal?"

"Sure."

"Depending on the thickness of the metal shroud around his bomb, that would do it."

"You're sure of this?"

"It's a quick read of what I see, but it's very obvious to me. It's a brilliant design, but that's its weak point. He even points out the flaw in the papers he sent, but says… or said… that no one would ever figure it out in time."

Two thousand miles distant, the retired nuclear scientist named Max looked at his watch and sighed.

"Louis, he may have been right. There's only an hour left."

The turbulence was getting worse by the mile as the Boeing 727 flew deeper into the fringes of the same hurricane that had nearly killed them at Pax River. Weaving around vicious thunderstorm cells and at least one radar return that looked frighteningly like the curved signature of a tornado, Doc had done the flying as Scott worked with the maps, keeping the plane at a safe altitude as they raced to close the distance to Grand Strand Airport, also known as North Myrtle Beach.

"Fifty-nine minutes left, Scott," Jerry told him from the engineer's seat. "And, God knows, I pray we don't need this information, but I do know a way—a messy way, but a way—to get power to the cargo door in flight if we wanted to open it. And if I'm wrong, I can manually pump it open from the ventral stairway in the back."

Scott shook his head as he kept his eyes on the radar display.

"Thanks, Jerry, but it doesn't look like we'll need to do it, after all. It seemed like a good idea until you pointed out we might not have a tail to fly with if that door ripped off."

"Oh, it'd rip off, all right. And in the process it could flip us out of control."

Scott waved the idea away without looking back. "Not a problem. We're not going to do it." He turned to the copilot.

"The airport's about fifteen miles ahead, Doc."

"I know," Doc replied. "I'm going to start a wide circle to the right and stay below one thousand feet. I'll try to get us close enough to see it without being seen."

Doc pulled the throttles back slightly and lowered the nose to bring them out of three thousand feet to a lower altitude. The landing gear warning horn sounded again, as it did each time the throttles were pulled back with gear up unless the horn cancellation lever had been pulled in advance. Jerry cursed softly and flipped the lever at the foot of the center console, silencing the noise. He was almost always ahead of the horn. It was unusual to hear it and a matter of pride for him to stay ahead of every throttle movement.

"How many radars do you think have been watching us?" Jerry asked.

"A bunch," Scott replied, "but with all this weather clutter, the returns off our fuselage are intermittent at best. They may think they see us, but they won't know for sure. Now, if I had the type of radar I used to have in my F-14, we could have seen that C-141 fifty miles out or more."

"There's a break in the clouds coming up to the left, Scott. See anything?" Doc asked.

A large, angry thunderhead was dumping sheets of rain to their left, but as the 727 passed the core of the rain shaft, a distant glimpse of the airfield came into view. Scott struggled to make out anything on the ground.

"I'm… not sure, Doc. I see the runway, but I can't make out anything on the field."

"I'll get us closer."

The fleeting image of another airborne object far ahead came into view and disappeared again, all in a heartbeat.

"Wait. Doc, I think I saw our friend up ahead. If so, he's maneuvering for a straight-in from the south for Runway 5."

Doc nodded. "I'll bring us left. Soon as we get through these rain shafts, you may be able to get another look. That'll bring us within five miles of the field, too."

Scott placed his chin on the dashboard and began a disciplined search pattern with his eyes, trying to look for movement against the field of rain and angry clouds ahead. There was some lightning, but for the most part the backside of the hurricane was still fairly benign as long as the eye of the massive storm was still offshore.

Another brief glimpse of the aircraft came and went.

"Definitely a big airplane, Doc. It's gotta be the C-141."

"Anything to the left on the field?"

Scott diverted his eyes toward the airport where Linda McCoy was looking. She leaned to the left to put her eyes almost on the glass of the captain's-side window. A short yelp from Linda brought Scott's attention fully on the airport as it suddenly popped into clear view.

"What do you see?"

"Several buildings and… two small airplanes about midway down the field, by the runway, on the southeastern seaward side."

Scott walked his eyes toward the location. There were indeed two airplanes on the taxiway. They were small, with swept-back wings and a familiar fuselage…

Oh jeez, Scott thought. "Doc, those are F-16's," he said out loud. "They got here ahead of us. Probably the same guys."

There was silence from the right seat. Scott looked over at Doc, puzzled by the silence. He was staring straight ahead, open-mouthed, and Scott's eyes followed his gaze between pillars of clouds several miles ahead to where the distinctive shape of a large military aircraft could be seen clearly making an approach to the same airfield.

Scott heard a sharp intake of breath from Doc, and then from Jerry, who had also spotted the airplane. He felt his heart freeze in midbeat and his stomach implode into a chasm of sudden hopelessness—their earlier words replaying in his mind: If it's not a C-141, it's a trap.

There was no mistaking the shape or the gray-and-white markings of the airplane, now clearly visible ahead.

It was a KC-10.

"It's a setup," Scott said quietly.

There was a silent nod from the right seat and a whispered "Oh my God!" from Linda behind him as the seconds ticked by.

Scott felt cold and clammy and dead. He hadn't believed they could lie to him again. What naivete. The Air Force and the FBI and God knew who else in the government all seemed bound and determined to examine the weapon until the last moment, then detonate it themselves. No one would listen to his warnings. A KC-10 couldn't carry a K-Loader and deploy it without ground equipment that would never be available at such a civilian field. A KC-10 couldn't load the bomb and couldn't drop the bomb. The C-141 had been the last option, and now that option was gone. Now they had no choice but to deal with the bomb themselves. To do anything else would doom a staggering number of South Carolinians to a gruesome death—some instantaneously, some over time.

"What do you want to do, Scott?" Doc asked softly, wanting to hear verbal confirmation of what he already knew.

"What can we do? We already considered everything, right? We can't let this thing go off onshore, and those idiots will do exactly that if we land. Myrtle Beach is just south of here."

There was no dissent.

Scott nodded. "Let's get out of here. Try to stay hidden, but let's go."

He didn't need to state where. They already knew where.

Scott reached down and turned off the UHF radio that had been the link to the C-141.

They didn't need it now. They were entirely alone.

Word that a retired government nuclear scientist had called in to warn the military how to disarm—and how not to disarm—Rogers Henry's Medusa weapon had flashed through the Air Force command post to the Situation Room in seconds, and then across the continent through the Starsuite to the President.

Traveling at five hundred miles per hour at thirty-nine thousand feet, the President sat in a desultory funk on the Air Force One side of the conference table, waiting for news as the countdown approached one hour. On the wall to his right, a weather screen was giving ongoing information from several sources on the storm's progress as it lashed across the eastern seaboard. He was acutely aware of the damage Sigrid was inflicting, and part of his mind worked on proper responses to the devastation. But the main focus of his thinking was a lonely 727 with five souls on board struggling to survive what might become an unsurvivable situation. The horror of what would happen to the country if the Medusa Wave was unleashed was something he couldn't concentrate on at the moment.

As General Kinney, the commander of the Air Combat Command, relayed word that a frenzied search was under way for a large electromagnet to rush to the coastal airport called Grand Strand, a young wide-eyed aide appeared at his elbow and handed him a piece of paper. The general scanned the page and looked sick, a change of expression the President of the United States caught immediately.

"What's the note, General?"

The general sighed and removed his reading glasses to rub his eyes as he spoke. "Sir, the 727 is not responding to radio calls, and air traffic control radar thinks they spotted him flying just south of Grand Strand and heading off east over the ocean. According to the note, an observer at the airport visually acquired them in the same place. This was about four minutes ago."

The President came out of his chair. "How could that happen? He agreed to land! Was the C-141 there?"

The general motioned several other officers and aides into the President's field of vision. "Just… just a second, sir."

A fifteen-second exchange ended with the Air Force Chief of Staff turning back to the Chief Executive and squaring his shoulders. "Sir, the two F-16's had landed and were on the field, and one of the two inbound KC-10's was on approach and is now on the ground. The C-141 is still about fifteen miles out."

The President stood in silence for a few seconds, running the facts over in his mind and trying to imagine what the obviously panicked aircrew of the 727 was thinking.

He sighed at last and rolled his eyes at the ceiling. "Of course. He saw the KC-10 and the fighters. He didn't see the C-141. You hadn't told him about the KC-10's, had you?"

More quick conferencing and a hurried radio call to the C-141 before the general turned back to the Air Force One side of the Starsuite.

"No, sir. He had not been told."

The President sank back down in his chair.

"Those poor bastards. They thought we were trying to trap them. They're headed east?"

"Yes, sir. Apparently."

"Call them! Explain what happened. Get him back!" the President snapped.

"Sir, we're trying everything to contact him. He's not responding. With the hurricane and the weather, radar returns are difficult for the controllers to sort out, since he has his transponder off. He's been flying, we believe, at low altitude, but he was last spotted as an intermittent target headed east over the Atlantic."

The President stared in silence for an uncomfortable period of time before replying, "He's going to try to dump it himself!"

"No, sir," the general responded as he studied the table.

"Why not? What else could he be planning? You're not suggesting a suicide?"

"Sir, that's a Boeing 727 with a side cargo door. I'm told it can't be opened in flight, and even if it could, you can't jettison cargo in flight."

"Then where is he going?"

"Mr. President, to his death, apparently." The statement was spoken without emotion or inflection, but the general felt very cold inside. Whether from fear of presidential reprisal for further screwing up the operation, or from the impending loss of a few hapless civilians about to perform a selfless act, he couldn't tell. He just felt cold and sick. He thought of his son, a young airline pilot based in Seattle. That could be his son out there, about to sacrifice his fife for his country. That's what they were doing, of course. That was the only explanation. Anyone who'd flown jets in the modern Air Force or Navy knew well what a simple nuclear bomb could do to a civilian population.

"General, did you hear me?"

The general snapped to attention suddenly. "No, sir, I'm sorry."

"I said let's get those F-16's in the air. Don't you think we should chase him down? Try to make contact?"

The general nodded. "We've already given that order, sir. But we should also be prepared to shoot him down if he turns back toward the coast too late for us to dispose of the bomb."

It was the President's turn to go slightly numb. Shoot a civilian cargo airliner down? He would have to issue the order if the plane decided to return and it was too late. The F-16's would be too close to survive the nuclear blast that would result from any missile impacting the aircraft. Apparently, thanks to the scientist in Santa Fe, there was no longer any doubt that such an explosion would be nuclear.

"Ah, General, the electromagnet idea. Could we get one to that airfield? If so, could the fighters get him back there, and if there was enough time, even ten minutes to turn it on, would that do the trick?"

"All unknowns, sir. We'll work on it."

"General?"

"Sir?"

"How many people did you say are aboard that airplane?"

A thin man in civilian clothes stepped into the frame and introduced himself as FBI. "Five persons, sir." He reeled off the names and professions, and the fact that the captain had been a naval aviator.

The President nodded. "Thank you." Then he turned back to the Air Force Chief of Staff, who had come in quietly to stand beside General Kinney. "How long do we have now?"

"Less than an hour, Mr. President. If they get much more than twenty minutes offshore, there won't be enough time left to bring them back."