Six Seconds

71

Indian Head, Maryland

Some twenty miles south of Washington, D.C., in southern Maryland, Tony Takayasu’s team worked against time.

In a redbrick lab, tucked in a wooded corner of the military base that overlooked the Potomac River, they applied Takayasu’s suppositions.

What if the mysterious liquid smuggled off the west coast was linked to the explosion in Montana? And what if the substance found in the bottles was a com ponent of the unknown explosive used to kill the deer? The liquid was labelled as Nigerian. The flag’s fabric was a weave common to East Africa.

These were the theories Takayasu had put to his col leagues on the flight from Malmstrom and, upon landing at Indian Head, they began working on them.

Employing test after test. It took hours but they learned that the flag was more than just cotton fabric from a weave common to the Ethiopian highlands. It had been engineered with molecular nanotechnology. It was permeated with a new explosive liquid substance that could be detonated through the millions of nano radio receptors.

The process was invisible and undetectable by sniffer dogs, swabs, scopes and scanners. It rendered the fabric a powerful explosive that could be detonated at will through a complex, coded, superlow frequency signal. Theoretically, that signal could be sent from a few feet away, or through wireless transmission from anywhere in the world.

It was a perfect weapon.

To test their work, the team tried to replicate the ex plosion with the recovered components. They set up in the Naval Ordnance Station in an isolated location. They’d affixed a piece of the fabric over a watermelon suspended in netting from a tree. A happy face had been drawn on the melon.

With laptops displaying mathematical calculations and chemical formulas, the team had programmed a digital camera. Through a small open observation window behind a blast shield, Takayasu used the auto focus and snapped a photo from forty yards away.

Seconds passed without a reaction-twenty, thirty, forty, then a full minute.

Nothing happened.

“Tony, I don’t think the fabric’s aligned with the focus beam,” Karen Dyer said, “I’ll move it.”

As she left the shield and walked to the watermelon, Ron Addison, one of the team’s scientists, held his open hand to Takayasu. “Maybe it’s the camera, Tony, let me check.”

While Addison inspected the camera, Takayasu verified readings on one of the laptops. As Karen was about to touch the melon, Addison raised the camera to his eye to photograph her just as Takayasu was alarmed by a reading on the computer.

“Ron, no!” Takayasu seized the camera. “Karen! Get away! Don’t touch it!”

Karen returned to the shield.

“Look at these readings.”

The team huddled around his laptop. “Now, let’s try it.” With his team safe behind the shield, Takayasu snapped a second picture- crack!- the air rippled, the shield shuddered as meaty chunks of the melon splat tered against it.

For several long seconds the group stood in stunned silence.

“My Lord.” Karen’s face went white.

“We need to make a lot of calls. Now!” Taka yasu said.