Medusa's Child

NINE

Pete Cooke left the Washington Approach Control facility as ScotAir 50 prepared to depart the holding pattern for Patuxent River Naval Air Station. This was a major story, and he needed to be there when the aircraft came down. But how? He needed privacy and a telephone to figure it out, and, he decided, an airline club room would do nicely.

Pete pulled out his membership card and headed for the American Admiral's Club, the small scanner still firmly plugged in his ear with the frequencies set to the Flitephone channels.

If he decides to start using a cellular telephone up there, I'm screwed! Pete thought. His scanner couldn't pick up cellular frequencies.

It took only a few minutes on The Wall Street Journal's 800 line to New York to round up two researchers, his secretary, and another reporter and get them on the same speaker phone. Avoiding the impression that he was becoming paranoid was another matter.

"Someone's circling D.C. with a live nuclear bomb? But there's been nothing on the wire, Pete. What's your source?"

"Things do exist, Hillary, that have not been reported on the wire services. My sources are the actual phone calls between the FBI and the aircraft. I've been monitoring them. All of them."

Pete could hear the murmur of voices back in New York.

"Okay, listen up, everyone," he began. "This could be nothing, but it could be an incredibly major story I've stumbled upon. I need background help immediately. I need anything you can find on a scientist named Rogers Henry. He died two years ago in Miami, Florida, but I have nothing else on him. Wife's name is Vivian Henry. Also, I need information on a Dr. Linda McCoy. I know nothing about her, either, but her name rings a bell." He passed the remaining names of those on board just as the Flitephone frequencies came alive again.

"Gotta go. They're making another phone call from the plane. Call my cellular when you've got something."

Tony DiStefano grabbed the proffered receiver and recognized the voice instantly.

"Captain McKay? What's up?"

"I was just getting ready to leave the holding pattern, sir, when…"

"Kill the 'sir' stuff, okay? Call me Tony."

"Okay. Ah, Tony, the bomb… I don't know any better way to put this… has started a countdown to detonation. The countdown is at a little less than three hours and thirty minutes. That's… ah… 8:01 p.m. There's a recorded voice back there too that says it's a twenty-megaton weapon that will vaporize everything within a twenty-five-mile radius. You remember what it threatened would happen if it was taken away from the Pentagon?"

"I remember. Remove it, it blows. But you said you were already between eight and eighteen miles away from the Pentagon as you flew that holding pattern. If the bomb was telling the truth, you'd be gone already. Obviously it knows you've left the Pentagon's coordinates."

"But, Tony, what if the bomb has a tolerance range of, say, twenty miles? If I stay within twenty miles, it's okay. If I fly twenty-one miles away, it detonates. I'm worried about going any farther. It's talking about killing millions of people and blowing away the entire capital. If this thing goes off while we're flying, the altitude of the burst will kill even more, and could blind anyone who makes the mistake of looking up."

"Calm down, Scott. Let's take this one step at a time."

"I'm trying to, but this scares the hell out of me. I'm certainly not anxious to die, but if I do, I sure don't want to be responsible for incinerating a few million people and two hundred years of American history. If we try to fly any farther from here, it may detonate."

"Whoa, fellow! We're not even sure it really is a bomb…" Scott's earlier words finally sank in. "Wait a minute, Scott. What do you mean, it's started a countdown? Tell me everything that's happened."

Tony DiStefano listened to Scott McKay summarize the events in the rear of the 727. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand long enough to whisper to one of the other agents in the room. "This is now a terrorist situation. Understand? We're classifying this now as domestic nuclear terrorism."

The sudden force of a high wind gust rattled the windows of the room they were in, causing everyone to look outside. Trees were whipping violently and sheets of rain were striking the windows periodically, announcing the arrival of the hurricane's leading edge.

Tony DiStefano closed his eyes for a few seconds and thought hard. He couldn't focus on the potential loss of life. He had to deal with the situation unemotionally.

"Has it said anything more about its position?" he asked.

The pilot's voice came back instantly. "No. But it is clear now that one of the aims of this maniac Rogers Henry was to torture his wife. She's back there now, by the device. It says it will detonate if she gets more than fifteen feet away. He's made her pacemaker into kind of a transponder. It knows where she is."

"Her pace …" Tony was rubbing his eyes again. "This thing makes a lot of detonation threats, doesn't it? Scott, it seems less concerned with where it is, than with making sure she's by it, right?"

"Seems that way, yes."

"Then… I think it's safe to leave. I know that's easy for me to say…"

The thought flashed through Tony's mind that an immediate detonation would begin with the line going dead and an incredibly bright light outside. Within seconds, he and the FBI building he was in would be literally blown away by the shock wave of the explosion.

He tried to shake off the chilling personalization of the threat and continue.

"Ah, Scott, I really think if it was telling the truth, you know, Take me away from the Pentagon and I'll blow,' you'd already be gone. Get the controllers to send you out to the southwest as fast as possible. Don't come back over the Beltway, because, well…"

"I know, just in case we're wrong. You're in D.C. too, right?"

"That's not the point, Scott, but, yes, I am."

There was a moment of silence from ScotAir, and Tony felt his heart skip a beat until McKay's voice returned to the line.

"I guess the people who'll meet us at Pax River are ready for this, huh, Tony? To disarm it, I mean?"

"We'll get them ready, Scott. Just get yourself there safely."

There was a hesitation from the aircraft.

"Tony, have you ever heard of a Medusa Wave?"

"A what?"

"Mrs. Henry, his ex-wife, told us he was working on something called the Medusa Weapon, or the Medusa Effect. It's an unbelievably large electromagnetic pulse. This device is claiming to be that weapon."

"We'll check it out, Scott. I can hardly think of anything worse than a twenty-megaton nuke over the White House. Can you keep this line open?"

"If you'll pay the bill." The pilot chuckled on the other end. "Yeah, we'll keep it open. I'll hand it over to Jerry, my engineer, as soon as he's finished getting Pax River weather. The winds a few minutes ago were gusting up to seventy knots."

"You can still land in that, right?"

"If the maximum crosswind doesn't get too high, yeah, I think so. But… it could get sporting."

"Define 'sporting,' Scott."

"Well, risky."

"How risky?"

The hesitation from ScotAir 50 was palpable.

"Well, if the crosswind is too severe… I mean, even a Boeing 727 has its limits."

Word reached the commanding officer of Patuxent River Naval Air Station that once again the plans had changed. It was bad enough that he'd had to prepare his people for the worst hurricane the base had faced in its history, but to have the FBI send him a civilian airliner with suspected nuclear material aboard solely because there were FBI experts at a conference on his base was just too much. There had been no directives from the Navy Department, just directives from the FBI, which wasn't even bothering to ask for his assent.

Yet, to keep peace between federal departments, he'd have to be diplomatic and help them out.

The unwelcome news that something more than stolen plutonium might be on board was flashed over from the command post as he stood behind his desk and scowled at the dark clouds and high winds already pummeling his field.

His yeoman appeared in the doorway holding a notepad and a wide-eyed look of disbelief.

"What now?"

"Sir, the FBI says they're not sure, but there might be a chance they've got an actual nuclear weapon on board that aircraft."

"WHAT?" He let the word reverberate around the walls of the office for a second as he tried to focus on what that really meant. "Good grief! What is it, some stolen military nuke?"

The yeoman was shaking her head. "No, sir. Apparently a home-built. And it may be armed."

"That does it!" the commander growled. "Any directives from the Pentagon about this?"

"No, sir."

"Then it's my decision?"

"Yes, sir."

"Call him back, the FBI agent you were speaking to. Tell him permission denied. Tell him they'll land that airliner here only over my cold dead body. We don't do armed ticking nukes at Pax River."

The yeoman smiled and nodded with enthusiasm. "Yes, sir!"

After passing the details of the latest phone call from ScotAir 50 to his team in New York, Pete Cooke sat hunched over one of the desks in the American club room with his computer connected to a telephone jack. He had quickly logged onto the Internet and fired off search requests looking for any information about a scientist named Rogers Henry and a thing called the Medusa Effect.

His cellular phone rang again while he was waiting for answers, this time with Ira, the leader of his New York research team, on the other end.

"Pete, I've E-mailed a whole file of stuff on EMP weapons and the Medusa Project. Can you log in and get it?"

"Yeah, in just a minute. Give me a quick overview."

"Lord, Pete, I'm not sure you realize the significance of what you've stumbled on. This is terrifying stuff!"

"How so?"

"Well, to start with, do you have any idea what a twenty-megaton explosion over Washington, D.C., would do?"

"A vague idea."

"You'd be instant history, for one. But so would several million others. The entire city would be uninhabitable for many years. Millions would die within a year in terrible agony of radiation poisoning. Hiroshima had thousands of half-dead burn victims. We'd have millions. The number of people permanently blinded by an unexpected airborne blast could number in the hundreds of thousands. The fallout would spread on the winds of that hurricane all over the Southern United States, and, essentially, the entire U.S. government infrastructure would cease to exist."

"Good Lord!"

"The human agony would be unfathomable, Pete. That's just the beginning. You told me this guy Rogers Henry claimed to have developed a Medusa Wave weapon? Well, that might be correct. Dr. Rogers Henry was, in fact, the lead scientist on an EMP project throughout the sixties until it was canceled in 1977. Some of the information is deeply classified still, but you'd be astounded how much of it is now declassified and floating around various databases."

"What, exactly, is a Medusa Wave?"

There was a whistle from the other end. "Any nuclear explosion will create an electromagnetic pulse, but the Medusa Project was trying to design a bomb that would trigger a much larger, continent-wide secondary wave which could immobilize electronics, electric systems, communications, even electric motors, and ruin a gazillion computer chips over an entire continent. If the theory was accurate and such a device could be built, a sustained electromagnetic wave pulse like that could cripple all of Europe, or North America."

"You mean, where computer users would lose data?"

"How about five orders of magnitude worse. No, I mean where they'd have to replace every damn computer chip, disk drive, modem, or other piece of hardware completely. Every cellular phone and every computer-chip watch. Anything with a silicone chip is essentially destroyed. Turned to stone. That's where the name Medusa came from. Silicon chip sees Medusa, silicon chip turns to useless rock. Anyway, even if the hardware isn't ruined, a Medusa Wave would be crippling because it would also insert extra ones and zeros in computer codes which happen to be flowing through a processor as the event occurs."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning it doesn't take much to crash a major computer program these days. Remember the huge telephone system crash several years ago on the eastern seaboard?"

"Yeah, I do," Pete replied. "1991, I think. But as I recall, that was a programming error, not some outside electronic pulse."

"That's right. Some technician in an office down in Piano, Texas, inserted a total of three lines of code in a multimillion-line program one fine afternoon without testing the effects, and the entire East Coast switching system crashes."

"Okay, but what…"

"You know how they fixed it?"

"How?"

"Nothing else would work, so they just took out the three new lines of code and restored what was there before. Like magic, it ran again, but no one knew why. The whole program runs on these incredibly complex computer languge codes. They couldn't debug it because no living human being could decipher the monster their operating system had become. It's far worse today, and phone companies are not alone."

"How does that relate to this?"

"Vulnerability, Pete. Most communication systems, manufacturing systems, banking and financial systems have so many millions of lines of that kind of computer code, and so many patches to that code, no one has a prayer of understanding the whole thing. Insert a few extra ones and zeros somewhere in there and it's like tampering with human DNA: God only knows what you're going to get!"

"You're saying that if a weapon like this went off…"

"Well, in addition to the small inconvenience of killing millions of Americans and wiping out every significant building in Washington, D.C., including the White House and the Capitol, killing most of the U.S. government, and creating human misery on a scale never experienced on this planet, the stock markets would come to a screeching halt, bank records would disappear, nothing could be processed, and the computer equipment itself would be ruined. We couldn't get any money, elevators would stop, hospitals would shut down, even sophisticated airliners would come out of the sky because their engines won't run without their computer controls. All phones would be down, so we couldn't even call in to yell at each other. No radar, no air traffic control, no pacemakers, no money, no services, no anything. And, Pete, it could take six months to just get all the computer systems replaced and running again, even if all the databases could be reconstructed. Pete, if this thing is real, even if it explodes offshore without hurting a soul, its electromagnetic effect will hobble this country."

"Good Lord!"

"To say the least. And there's more. You remember what a house of cards our international banking system has become? The whole rickety thing depends on computers to keep everything kited properly. Take the computers and the international communications away and the U.S. of A, is out of the game. We're talking theoretical worldwide financial collapse. Please, Pete, tell me this is a joke."

"It's not a joke, Ira," Pete replied. "I wish it was. Of course, we don't know it can really create all that havoc…"

"You'd better pray that thing doesn't go off anywhere then, buddy, unless you're on the barter system."

"Ira, do me a favor. Make sure all of you keep a tight lid on this. Seriously. I don't want to be responsible for creating a panic."

"But what if it's true? What if this nut really figured out the physics and this is the real thing?"

"I still don't want to create a panic."

"You already have. I'm panicked! I'm headed for the cash machine downstairs as soon as we hang up, and then I'm going to go cower in the lowest basement in the city."

"Don't take this wrong, but you don't count."

"Understood, Pete, but if Uncle Sam doesn't warn people, shouldn't we? At the very least, they should be evacuating D.C. Shouldn't we call our friends at the networks, or something?"

"We have friends at the networks?" Pete asked sarcastically.

"Well…" Ira's voice trailed off.

Pete sat in thought for a few seconds, trying to imagine public reaction to news of such an impending catastrophe.

"Only when we're sure, Ira. Only when we're absolutely sure."

"Doc, I'll spell you for a few minutes if you want to stretch." Scott looked over at the copilot, who nodded and pulled his large hands away from the yoke as the Boeing bounced its way through the roiling air currents.

"You've got her," Doc replied. "Autopilot's engaged, we're on vector heading two-zero-zero, as discussed, more or less level at ten thousand, given the turbulence."

"Roger."

"I'm gonna go check on Mrs. Henry. Bellow on the PA if you need me."

"Doc." Scott looked up at the veteran pilot as he hesitated halfway out of his seat.

"Yeah?"

"If she's got to stay back there, I guess we'd better strap her down somehow."

Doc nodded. The use of a cargo strap for a seat belt would be undignified, but with the aircraft bucking in the turbulence and the potential violence of the landing ahead, the prospect of having her catapulted into the ceiling was not acceptable.

"I was thinking the same thing, Scott."

Jerry Christian turned around as Doc moved past his chair. "You need help?"

"Naw. I'll take care of it." He patted Jerry on the shoulder as he glanced back at Linda McCoy, who was sitting in the observer's seat watching with a question in her eyes as he moved toward the door. "Doctor, you stay put. Two of us moving around in this turbulence is enough. You strapped in?"

"No," she answered, looking down at her seat belt, which was hanging loose.

"It'd be a good idea to get it on."

Doc left the cockpit and scrambled down the passageway toward the back of the cargo cabin and around the edge of the device built by Rogers Henry.

Vivian Henry was sitting cross-legged on the aluminum cargo floor, staring at the metal face of the thing, an unfathomable expression on her face. The sight of a large man moving into her peripheral vision startled her momentarily, and she looked up at him with the expression of one in pain slowly recognizing the presence of a friend.

Doc was startled as well by the sight of her. For a fleeting moment warm memories of his maternal grandmother flooded back from early childhood. He'd traveled from his Arkansas home to spend several summers with her. Jenny, the pillar of society in Rockport, Maine, and the unyielding force that had held his family together through the Depression years, before he was born. Her dignity and femininity had stayed intact through the roughest of times, and the pictures of her as a strikingly beautiful woman holding her six-year-old grandson reminded him of Vivian Henry. He still missed Jenny. Her warmth and her wry sense of humor had been legendary in Rockport.

But this was someone else sitting like a prisoner before him, someone he didn't know, regardless of how familiar she seemed—someone who was roughly his age, and only a year or two younger than the eternal image of his grandmother he carried in his memory.

"How're you doing?" he asked, feeling suddenly self-conscious. How could she be doing under the circumstances? What a dumb question!

"I would prefer to find the 'off switch as soon as possible," she said simply, her eyes drifting back to the device that had become her captor.

"Anything new?" Doc asked.

She shook her head. He briefed her on Pax River and the impending landing in high winds. "Vivian, we don't have seat belts back here in the cargo cabin, so I'm… going to have to use a cargo strap to hold you secure. It could get quite rough."

Her eyes latched onto Doc's suddenly. "Is there somewhere remote you could take us, and unload both this monstrosity and me, and get away?"

Doc knelt beside her and put his right hand on her shoulder.

"I… don't know, Vivian. Right now, we just need to get ourselves to someone who knows how to disarm it."

"He's dead."

"Pardon?"

"The only person who knew how to disarm it was Rogers, and he's dead. Believe me, I know. I worked with him for years at Los Alamos. I was an engineer helping his team construct the exotic things they designed, but he knew more than all of the rest of us combined on the subject of triggers. He knew all the tricks for arming and disarming and invented most of them. If he decided this wasn't to be disarmed, there will be no way to disarm it." She was trying to remain calm, but he heard a small catch in her voice and realized she had choked back a sob before quickly regaining control. She waved her hand at the device as she struggled to maintain her composure. He decided not to call attention to the effort.

"Vivian, I've been wondering about something. I can't figure out how this thing could sit for two years with the batteries remaining fresh. I mean, it has to have batteries."

She took a slightly ragged breath. "When I entered his workshop last week for the first time, I noticed there was a wire in the back going into the wall. I should have been suspicious, but I was trained not to question anything he did, and I never thought of it until now. It must have been a power cord, but I didn't realize it at the time. I don't know what I thought it was."

The moment of silence seemed awkward, and he found himself searching for something to say as they both looked around in response to a particularly severe jolt of turbulence.

Doc cleared his throat. "You know, I think this has to be an elaborate bluff. I mean, he'd need plutonium to make this Medusa Effect work, wouldn't he, and you don't just waltz down to the corner 7-Eleven for a container of plutonium, right?"

The reassurance had no effect. Her eyes looked deeply into his, the anguish showing clearly. She looked back at the device for the longest time, the sound of the engines and the slipstream their only audible companion until her voice reached his ears again.

"I told the captain," she said.

"Pardon?"

She looked him squarely in the eye. "Rogers never bluffed. The fact is, he could have obtained plutonium, which means that we must consider this a live nuclear weapon, capable of killing millions of innocent people. I can't even imagine the damage it could do, even if the Medusa Effect doesn't work."

The words hit Doc Hazzard like a body blow. Up to that moment the possibility that they were flying around with a genuine nuclear bomb had been unlikely.

Remote.

But in an instant his confidence crumbled.

"Vivian, you said it was a mockup! You were convinced."

She shook her head slowly.

"I was convinced. But I was wrong."