Medusa's Child

TEN

This is becoming unmanageable.

Tony DiStefano realized the three agents trying to update him were not going to stop talking simultaneously.

"Hey! Hey! HEY!" He held up his hand to silence them and waited until all eyes in the room were on him and all voices had paused in midsentence.

"If we don't do this in an orderly way, we're going to screw it up!" He looked at the three people waiting with papers in hand and pointed to them one by one.

"Bill, you first. What do you have?"

"Weather report at Pax River. It's getting worse."

"Okay. Donna, how about you?"

"Background information on the Henrys. You won't believe it."

"Don't editorialize. And, Jim?"

"Jake."

"Sorry, Jake. How about you?"

"The Navy's decided he can't land there."

"Where? He can't land where?"

"Pax River. The commander there has closed the base."

"Dammit! Okay, Bill, Donna, stand by. Jake, who passed that word?"

"The Navy command post at the Pentagon. They're still holding."

"Get them for me."

The agent immediately handed Tony a receiver and punched a blinking light on the telephone console. The conversation was short and tense. Tony replaced the receiver and turned back to the agent called Jake.

"Gall the director's office and tell Janie, his secretary, I'm on my way there. I need the director to work on the White House Situation Room, NSC, and the Secretary of Defense to force the Navy to get that base reopened. We don't have time to screw around!" He whirled toward the other two agents who had been waiting to brief him.

"Donna? Call the aircraft. Tell the captain—his name is McKay—have the air traffic people put him in some sort of holding pattern near Pax River and wait for instructions."

"Should I tell him they closed the base?"

"Yes. But tell him I expect to have it fixed in a few minutes. Then find that open line to the Situation Room and brief them." Tony headed out the door, then came back.

"Bill."

"Yeah?"

"Follow me down the hall and tell me about the weather on the way."

The man leaped to his feet and headed for the door. "In a phrase, it's going to hell!"

A chorus of jet noise outside the American club room heralded the reopening of Washington National Airport and caused Pete Cooke to look up in surprise. The rain had abated somewhat, but the winds were rising steadily, the heavy gusts even rocking some of the jetliners as they prepared for pushback.

There was no way to get to Pax River in time. He had tried unsuccessfully to hire a helicopter before hearing that the Navy had closed the base. He would stay at National instead and keep digging while hoping his scanner continued to pick up the calls to the 727.

Pete scowled at the telephone. "Come on, come on! I don't have all century!" Ira had unearthed the name and number of Dr. William Barker, a long-retired coworker of Rogers Henry after a frantic search through the Journal's own archives. The physicist was living in suburban Maryland, and with any luck, the man might even be home.

A woman answered, her voice suspicious as she reluctantly summoned her husband. He listened carefully as Pete Cooke identified himself as a Wall Street Journal reporter calling from Washington trying to find out more about Rogers Henry, the scientist.

"I worked with Henry for over a decade," Dr. Barker said. "For him, actually. You know he's dead?"

"Yes, sir. Two years ago, if that's correct."

"That's right. Pancreatic cancer. From diagnosis to death it took less than nine months. Why are you asking about him?"

Pete closed his eyes and made a hip-shot decision.

"Doctor, I need your help in understanding something that's occurring right now, this very moment, over suburban Washington. I have reason to believe that before he died, Rogers Henry constructed an operating model of the weapon you helped him work on."

"What?"

"Yes, sir. I also have good reason to believe that weapon is at this moment armed, in an airplane over the Washington, D.C., area, and on the verge of… detonating."

Silence.

"Sir?"

"You say you're from The Wall Street Journal?" Dr. Barker asked.

"Yes."

"Your name's Cooke?"

"Pete Cooke. That's right."

"Your home office know what phone line you're sitting in front of right now?"

"Ah yes, but…"

"I'll call you back."

The line went dead. Pete stared at the phone wondering whether to redial the physicist's number or give him a few minutes.

Of course! He'd be well trained to never pass information unless he initiated the call He'll call New York to check on me.

Pete dialed Ira's number in New York and alerted him to pass on the club room number in Washington the second the scientist called.

Within two minutes the phone rang with the physicist on the other end.

"Is this Pete Cooke?"

"Yes."

"Okay. This is Bill Barker again. I'm satisfied you are who you say you are. How much do you know about the Medusa Project?"

"Only the name and the fact it involved an attempt to generate an electromagnetic pulse."

There was a sarcastic laugh from the other end.

"Pulse, hell. Any five-and-dime nuke can generate an EMP. We were working on the ultimate weapon for modern warfare, a bomb that would completely shut down a computer-based country."

"Did you succeed?" Pete shot back.

There was silence on the other end for so long, Pete began to wonder if the line had gone dead.

"Are we on deep background here? Do I have your word you won't quote me?"

"If you want to be on background, Dr. Barker, you've got my word."

"Mr. Cooke, I signed the usual oath not to talk, and I sure don't want to go to jail, but frankly I'm not sure what is and isn't classified anymore. Anyway, I won't tell you how to do anything, but I will tell you that we truly believed we were on the threshold of an incredible breakthrough when they canceled the project."

"Why did they cancel it?"

"Because Jimmy Carter decided to throw a bone to the Soviets. He didn't think we were that close and he wasn't willing to spend the money to find out. The Soviets did believe we could do it. In fact, they were terrified, so they pressured the devil out of Carter to cut us off, and the little wus capitulated. I mean, we were right there! Trembling on the brink. A few more months of running calculations, one round of field tests to see if we could create a tiny secondary effect, and I truly think we might have validated the theory."

"Could Rogers Henry have completed the work on his own?"

The answer came without a second's hesitation. "If the theory was right, yes. They kept all the notes when they threw us out, but I'm sure Rogers had duplicates of everything. I always suspected he was violating the rules about keeping personal files, even taking equipment home. After all, the Medusa was his baby. He had the knowledge, he had the myopic drive, he just didn't have any way of proving it worked without actual tests, which would have been risky. But he's been dead for two years. So tell me, Mr. Cooke, what in hell did you mean about there being a working model over Washington ready to explode?"

Pete filled him in on everything he knew so far, including the puzzling fact that the device seemed to think it was in the Pentagon. He heard the receiver being moved to the physicist's other hand, and a long exhaled breath.

"My God! After all this time, I would think… Well, I don't see how. I mean, the man's been dead for two years!"

"Interesting," Pete replied. "I expected you to say that Henry couldn't have obtained the plutonium."

There was a short, sharp laugh on the other end. "Oh, believe me, Mr. Cooke, Rogers could have squirreled away enough plutonium. Remember he was the boss, the head of the program. He could have taken anything he wanted over time. It's the question of why he'd want to build a real weapon I can't answer. I mean, what possible motivation would he have had?"

"That's… what I'm asking you. We know his ex-wife is the one who arranged to ship the weapon."

The shock on the other end was palpable.

"What? You say Vivian is involved?"

"That's right."

"How?"

"She's aboard the aircraft, and if I heard correctly, the device is programmed to detonate if she moves more than fifteen feet away from it. Killing her seems to be a part of the plan."

"Oh Jesus, he was serious!"

"About what, sir?"

Another long pause. "About murdering his ex-wife. The last time I talked with Rogers was three years ago. He had called me with some screwy question about where we'd obtained certain parts years ago. I remember thinking it was an odd request. I almost asked him if he was building his own bomb as a hobby, but he didn't have much of a sense of humor. I did make the mistake of asking about Vivian, though. She was a classy, beautiful woman—one of our engineers at Los Alamos, in fact, when he married her. I was always convinced that Rogers was abusing her. I'd always figured that someday she'd get enough and leave him. Anyway, after I asked casually about Vivian, it took me an hour to get the bastard off the phone. All he wanted to do was rage and tell me how much he hated her for leaving him, how evil she was, and how she had plotted to destroy him, which was ridiculous. He wanted her dead."

"So he has… he had… a reason to hurt her, Dr. Barker?"

"In his twisted mind, yes. He told me outright how much he wanted to kill her, slowly and painfully. Told me he dreamed of it. I thought it was just steam. I hoped it was just steam. I mean, this man had been a responsible world-class scientist. Just the thought of him trying to blow up Washington along with several million people to get his wife is beyond surreal!"

"Doctor, that brings up a key question: Do you think he was capable of doing just that? Was he capable of attacking his own country with a nuclear weapon?"

"Oh jeez!"

The reply was awash with disgust, followed by silence. Pete hurried to fill it. "I mean, was he that unbalanced?"

Dr. Barker's voice came back, low and steady. "Could he have set a nuclear trap for his wife and ignored the incredible human damage it would have caused? I doubt it. I can tell you he was well aware of what the blast over Hiroshima had done, and he had always professed to be horrified at the carnage the Japanese suffered for being slow to surrender. Hiroshima was his motivation to build a weapon that would kill a country's economy, not its people. But that was before our program was terminated, and before he began going very strange on us."

"So was he capable of mass murder?"

"How the hell can anyone know that, Mr. Cooke? I know he hated Vivian. I know he hated the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense. I know he hated President Carter—we all referred to him as Jimmy the Small. But if Rogers really succeeded in creating a Medusa weapon, he would know the incredible damage that the triggering nuclear blast could do, not to mention what the Medusa would do to everyone who has as much as a bank account. He would have known that a Medusa Wave would go far beyond just vaporizing the military puzzle palace and devastating D.C." The physicist's voice trailed off. "You said twenty megatons. You do realize what an airborne twenty-megaton thermonuclear bomb would do to humans below, don't you? You do know that's the engine of a Medusa Weapon?"

"Yes, I know."

"Lord! You say they're right now flying over Washington?"

"Actually, sir, they've sent them to Patuxent River Naval Air Station about fifty miles south."

"That's still too close! They've got to get that airplane far, far away, immediately!"

"So"—Pete pushed—"you can't be certain that he's capable of doing all this?"

"You misunderstood me, Mr. Cooke. I can be certain." Pete heard an ominous, deadly serious tone come into William Barker's voice. "That's what's scaring the living hell out of me," Barker continued. "When I remember the pure hate in Rogers' voice, I have to tell you I wasn't talking to a sane man. Could Rogers have planned something like this? Yes. Sadly, the answer is yes."

In the midst of the ringing phones and tense voices filling the conference room with urgency, the brief absence of one FBI agent had gone unnoticed—just as the young agent had planned. Hearing that ScotAir 50 was being sent to Patuxent River Naval Air Station left him no choice, since his sister and two young nieces lived on the base. While his brother-in-law was safely overseas in Rota, Spain, the lieutenant commander's family was sitting innocently in the flight path of an armed thermonuclear device.

He had to do something.

The agent shut his office door and pulled out his handheld cellular phone to dial his sister's home number in Pax River. It took four rings before her voice reached his ear.

"Hello?"

"Jolene? This is Tom. I've only got a second. Are the girls both there?"

"Why are you whispering, Tom?"

"Listen to me very closely," he said. "You've got to grab the girls, get in the car, and head out of there immediately."

She protested. There were endless reasons not to leave. The wind was already at gale force, the rain was terrible, they needed to watch the base house for wind damage…

"JOLENE! For Chrissakes, listen. Get out of there! Go north as fast as possible. Head for the summer cottage in New Jersey, but move."

He felt the risks increasing exponentially. He was on a cellular. A cellular could be monitored by anyone, including other departments of the FBI. It was only slightly less risky than an FBI office phone.

It was obvious she wasn't going to budge without a reason, and time was running out. With little more than a second's hesitation he filled in the blanks of what was headed their way, and what it could do.

And the protests stopped.

"My God, Tom, it's armed? Why haven't we been told?"

"They can't evacuate everyone. Jolene, we're wasting time! Get the girls and go. Don't tell a soul why. Just go. Now. Please!"

"Okay. Okay, we're gone."

"Keep your car phone on," he said as an afterthought.

But the line was already dead.

Dr. William Barker—the former coworker of Rogers Henry—had listened to Pete Cooke's thank-you and replaced the receiver in a state of shock. How could Rogers have built a Medusa alone? And if he really had, how could he use it for such evil purposes—for mass murder?

The retired scientist looked around suddenly, as if afraid he was being watched. What should he do now? Should he tell the government? They already knew. Should he call the media? But Pete Cooke was the media, he reminded himself. Or should he concentrate on trying to find some way to protect his computers and disk drives?

He refused to consider an airburst near D.C. There wouldn't be time to prepare for that or run anywhere. No, if they were sending the bomb to Pax River and it detonated there accidentally, he would live through it, but the electronic destruction would be incredible. The Medusa Wave, however large or small, would destroy every computer-based service he depended on.

The bank accounts should be first. Cash out everything. In a few hours it might be too late.

This can't be happening! He realized he had actually considered the possibility he was dreaming.

Another disturbing memory kept nagging at him. The reporter had asked if he might know how such a device could be defused.

"If Rogers didn't want it defused," he'd told Cooke, "it will be impossible to defuse. He knew virtually all the tricks."

That meant, of course, that if it was counting down…

The fifth ring reasserted the telephone's presence on his consciousness, and he grabbed the receiver, surprised to hear the voice of another alumnus of the Medusa Project.

"Did you see the E-mail I sent you in the last twenty minutes?" the caller asked.

"No. Why?"

"Someone's surfing around the Internet asking frantic questions about the Medusa Wave and about Rogers. Any idea what's up?"

"You won't believe it."

"That's what you used to say at Sandia Labs back in Albuquerque, and my response is still the same: Try me."

Tony DiStefano thanked the FBI director and charged out the door to resume his mission, thankful that a heated debate had finally concluded in the basement of the White House. The question that had momentarily convulsed the senior advisors of the executive branch was whether the government of the United States really believed the device aboard ScotAir 50 was an armed nuclear weapon which could, in fact, detonate.

"So, do we believe, or don't we?" Tony had asked as the director replaced the phone.

"We believe. According to the Situation Room, it is, it can, and if those nuclear wizards at Pax River can't defuse it, it will. At least we're getting it fifty miles south of here, but if that damn thing should somehow go off while they're working on it…"

"So the base commander is overruled?"

"The base commander is toast if he tries to interfere. The Navy finally ordered him to stand aside."

Tony had started for the door before the director's voice stopped him.

"There's more, Tony."

"Oh?"

"According to the National Security Council, we are officially even more panicked about the possibility of a Medusa Wave."

"Really? I know almost nothing about the Medusa Project, or Medusa Waves."

"We've got a briefing package coming over by secure fax from, I think, the Energy Department. We don't know if such a thing exists, but we have to assume it does. The important point is that a Medusa Wave would be designed to cripple computer-dependent societies."

"And we, of course…"

The director's head was bobbing. "Are an incredibly computer-dependent society. The NSC supposedly has an old study from the late sixties on what it could do to us. It was pretty grim even back then before personal computers, Tony. Today it's far worse. In the late seventies we were hardened against a major electromagnetic flux, or whatever they call it. I'm told we've gotten lax."

"Is the FBI still in control of this?"

The director sighed. "I'm in the middle of a turf war, but for the moment, we're calling the tune and the Navy's dancing. Soon as you get that jet on the ground, I'm sure well lose control to the NSC and the Situation Room and the Pentagon."

Jerry Christian handed the latest weather slip to Scott McKay as Doc Hazzard returned from the cargo cabin. Scott studied it for a few seconds and shook his head as he glanced up to brief the copilot.

"Winds are now three-six-zero degrees at forty-eight knots, Doc, gusts to sixty-five, and that's a forty-degree crosswind to Runway 32, but a sixty-degree crosswind to Runway 6."

"What about Runway 2? That's almost perfectly aligned with the wind."

"It's closed."

Doc slowly let himself down in the right seat and fumbled for the seat belt, his eyes on the swirling mass of dark clouds ahead. He glanced at the glowing radarscope, which was tracking cells of heavy rain and turbulence in all directions between their position and Pax River some ten miles to the east. The 727 was bucking in moderate turbulence now, and even reading the instruments was a struggle.

"Scott, I don't know about this…" Doc said, the sound of his long sigh audible over the clatter of rain hitting the windscreen. "She's going to be hard to handle down there."

Scott nodded. "Jerry and I were looking at the wind charts. It's out of limits, but not by much. Doc, what I'm thinking is, if I angle the airplane from the downwind side of Runway 32 to the upwind, rather than trying to land straight down the middle, we'll be so slow over the ground I can probably get her stopped okay."

"And if not?" Doc shot back.

"Well, if not, then we'll go off into the grass and probably be out of business next week."

Doc snorted and shook his head. They were out of business next week anyway.

"What if we jostle that thing enough to set it off? What if we crash? Will it detonate?"

"I don't think so," Scott replied.

"We're landing at, what, a hundred and twenty knots?"

"We weigh one hundred sixty-five thousand pounds. For a normal flaps-thirty landing, that's an approach speed of one hundred forty knots," Jerry added.

Scott glanced back at the engineer and nodded a thank you. "Okay, one hundred forty minus about fifty knots of headwind equals one hundred knots. I've driven a go-cart almost that fast before."

"Yeah, but with two terrified passengers and a ticking nuclear bomb aboard?" Linda McCoy added from behind Scott's seat.

Startled, he struggled to turn his head far enough to see her. He'd forgotten she was there.

She wasn't smiling.

"Linda, that's slow enough to get us stopped without major damage, even if we end up in the grass."

Doc adjusted himself in the seat and ran his hands gently over the control yoke. "Bottom line is, we've got no choice." He looked Scott full in the face. "You ready, Captain McKay?"

Scott nodded.

"Okay." Doe keyed the microphone and declared ScotAir 50 ready for the instrument landing approach to Runway 32 just as the 727 penetrated a hailstorm, the deafening sound of hailstones impacting the aluminum skin of the Boeing making conversation momentarily impossible.

A shattering sound like the crack of a rifle amplified several dozen times shot through the cockpit, accompanied by an incredibly bright flash of light. Scott could hear Linda gasp behind him as adrenaline filled his own bloodstream.

"Lightning strike!" he managed to bellow back to his right. "Not dangerous!"

"Just frightening as hell," Doc added.

As quickly as it began, the hail ended.

"Come right, Scott. That's a nasty cell three miles ahead," Doc said.

"Tell the controller to give us an intercept to final from the south side of the straight-in nonprecision course."

Doc nodded and pressed the mike button as a second flash of lightning filled their eyes and ears.

The tip to look at an Internet "chat room" called U-235 came by phone from a friend at Columbia University forty blocks to the north. It took less than a minute for the ABC investigative correspondent to pull a rapidly moving discussion onto the computer screen in his office.

For nearly a minute the screen remained unchanged. The possibility that all three participants had fled somewhere else in the face of a stranger ran through his mind, but at last a new line appeared.

The correspondent typed in the network's 800 number and his extension and sat back to wait, his mind occupied with the details of a story he'd done about Los Alamos and Sandia Labs, and what was developed there.

Part of his mind was still tracking the hoped-for phone call when it dawned on him what he'd done.

"Damn!" The correspondent launched a number two pencil across his small office. The automated voice on the other end of the 800 number would tell the man he'd reached the ABC Network. Undoubtedly he'd hang up before dialing the extension. Surely he'd be reluctant to talk to the media.

He turned back to his computer to offer a direct collect call number at the same moment the phone rang. He snatched up the receiver.

"So ABC wants to know about the Medusa Project. I guess it's time."