Medusa's Child

ELEVEN

The lightning was almost continuous now, illuminating the soggy countryside below with ghostly, staccato flashes reflecting off an eerie landscape of dark forests bisected by small roads carrying long lines of rain-smeared headlights creeping northward.

Dr. Linda McCoy's fingers dug into the armrests of her observer's seat as the 727 lurched through another narrow band of severe turbulence. With each encounter she could see the two pilots struggling to keep the plane upright, while her stomach churned and her mind reeled. The storm, she realized, was terrifying her more than the bomb in the cargo cabin.

Linda watched Scott's right hand shove all three throttles to maximum power as the bottom once again dropped from beneath them. He seemed incredibly calm, yet she could feel the stress in his voice each time he spoke. He was obviously frightened and trying hard not to show it.

If he's scared, she concluded, I'm scared!

The sound of the air traffic controller's voice clearing them to begin an instrument approach to Pax River was like music to her ears, especially after they'd been told minutes before that the field was closed.

Just a little bit longer! she told herself as the cockpit rocked and bounced massively, sending chills up her back and bile into her throat.

She'd never experienced anything like this, not even on bush flights in remote parts of the world. She couldn't control the terror that was taking over. At that moment a sudden pitch-up slammed her downward in the seat as the 727 rammed into a massive column of rising air and just as suddenly staggered into a vicious downdraft. She wondered how much more the aging aircraft could take.

Face it, girl, she told herself, you might not get out of this alive!

Her thoughts flew to her home in Colorado. She should have been there by now. She thought of her cat. She thought of her parents. She thought of Christa McAuliffe on the doomed space shuttle Challenger and wondered if she'd felt the same panic as it exploded.

Scott McKay's voice cut through her preoccupation like an electric jolt.

"Flaps fifteen!" he barked suddenly to Doc, his voice almost lost in a brief rematch with a column of hail.

"Flaps fifteen set," Doc replied instantly as his left hand positioned the flap lever to the appropriate detent. "Engine anti-ice on. Your localizer is tuned and identified, Scott."

"He cleared us to three thousand feet?" Scott asked.

Doc nodded. "That's right. Three."

"Gear down. Landing checklist. Flaps twenty-five."

She watched Doc's hand snap the gear handle to the down position and heard the instant sound of high-speed air rushing somewhere beneath their feet as the nose gear door opened. The main landing gear would be coming out as well, some eighty feet behind them.

Linda's eyes darted from Doc to Scott to Jerry and back again. They were calm. She should be calm. But how could anyone be calm with such violent shaking and banging around? They were barely in control of the plane—and that thought sent her terror to new heights.

The approach controller's voice cracked over the speaker above her head.

"ScotAir Fifty, fly present heading, cleared approach to Runway 32, maintain twenty-five hundred feet until on course inbound, and contact the tower now."

"ScotAir Fifty cleared approach, twenty-five hundred until on course," Doc repeated. "Cleared approach, Scott."

"Roger. Set me up on the inbound course now. That's three-three-zero. I'm gonna hold an extra thirty knots for wind shear."

"I'd recommend a little faster, like a plus forty knots," Doc said.

Scott glanced quickly at the copilot, then over his shoulder at Jerry. Somehow Linda was aware of Jerry nodding, though she couldn't take her eyes off the windscreen ahead.

"Okay, plus forty," Scott agreed as he reached forward to reposition a small white plastic pointer on his airspeed indicator.

Doc toggled the radio again to make contact with the control tower, and the controller's voice came back weak through the overhead speaker as a burst of lightning-caused static crashed across their ears.

"…cleared to land. Winds are, ah, three-five-five at fifty-five to sixty, gusts greater than twenty knots above that. The runway is open for you, ScotAir, but landing is at your discretion."

"Understood, Patuxent tower," Doc answered, his head going forward immediately to read the instruments, his voice raised against the deafening sounds of heavy rain. "Okay, Scott, we're at fifteen hundred, five miles out. That's the final approach fix. We're cleared down to four hundred feet."

Jerry Christian's voice chimed in from the engineer's seat. "The navigation radio's monitoring good and steady, and the runway's in sight at about ten o'clock."

"This is one helluva crosswind!" Scott said, his voice little more than a constrained squawk as his hands moved the control yoke ceaselessly to keep on the glide path and localizer course to the runway. "We're crabbing nearly thirty degrees to the runway!"

"Scott, be ready for a go-around," Doc said. "Don't press it! We've got the fuel!"

Linda felt like a rag doll being tossed around in a washing machine. She heard the strain of Doc's voice as he began calling out parameters and talking almost nonstop.

"Speed's plus forty-five knots. You ready for flaps?"

"Yeah. Flaps thirty."

"Roger. Flaps thirty."

"Set final speed. I'm continuing down to the minimum descent altitude. Field in sight ahead. Let's call it a visual."

"You want the wipers, Scott?" Doc asked as he moved the flap lever to the final setting.

"Yeah!"

Doc snapped on the windshield wipers, which began making a terrible racket, almost drowning out his voice as he ran through the six-item landing checklist. The words "Checklist complete" were spoken just as a huge bolt of lightning lit up the landscape ahead.

Linda heard a gasp from the direction of the flight engineer's seat. "That hit the tower!" Jerry Christian said.

"Sonofabitch!" Doc added, punching the transmit button. "Pax River tower, you still there?"

No answer.

"Eight hundred feet, and you're forty knots above marker speed," Doc intoned.

"Are they there?" Scott asked, his eyes riveted on the instruments.

"No, but we're already cleared to land," Doc replied.

"Okay."

"You're six hundred feet now, plus thirty-eight knots."

"Okay."

"Speed is plus thirty-four and… That's a wind shear, Scott! It jumped up ten, maybe twenty knots… No, it's more…!"

"I can feel it!"

Scott's right hand was pulling back the throttles as Doc's left hand covered his. "Not too much! Don't pull off too much!"

"What's my speed?"

"We're four hundred feet, speed plus, ah, almost fifty."

"I gotta slow down!"

"Scott…"

Doc's voice trailed off as the airspeed rapidly increased another twenty knots, the sound of the slipstream roaring at them with greater authority every second.

"This could be a microburst, Scott!" Doc's words echoed in Linda's ears as the Boeing 727 flew through the precise midpoint of a massive rapidly descending column of air.

In an instant the forty-knot headwind became a forty-knot tailwind. Suddenly the wings had insufficient airspeed to produce enough lift to keep them airborne, and the seventy-five-ton airplane shuddered and began falling.

Linda gripped the armrests, her heart in her throat. This time there was no hint of the climbing sensation she'd felt on the other side of each downdraft. This time they were falling.

She heard a sharp sound from Scott's throat, but no coherent words. In her peripheral vision she could see Doc equally stunned as Scott shoved the throttles forward all the way to the firewall, making an audible impact against the stops.

It was Jerry Christian's voice from behind that found the words. "WIND SHEAR! MAX POWER! PULL UP! PULL UP!"

"Doin' it…" Scott managed.

"Airspeed is one hundred. Scott, we're sinking!" Doc yelled.

"I know it!"

"Two thousand feet per minute!" Doc's voice filled her ears as the captain responded.

"Max power!" Scott replied. Doc's left hand followed the throttles, but they were already as far forward as they could go.

Doc's eyes took in the radio altimeter, which dutifully read their exact altitude above the ground. The pointer was moving down through the last digit above zero.

"One hundred feet, Scott. PULL!"

"I am!"

The runway rushed at them as Scott hauled the yoke back into his chest. Linda felt the jet respond in pitch, the deck angle increasing suddenly as the tarmac and the grass alongside the runway raced up at them from a thirty-degree angle to the left. If they hit like that, she thought, they'd explode in a ball of fire!

"BACK! BACK! Up to fifteen degrees!" Doc yelled.

Scott gave a quick nod. His voice wouldn't come. The 727 banked right, rolling right, into the wind. The ground was still rushing at them. He had to get the wings leveled! The controls felt mushy, as if the big jet had no more performance left to give.

"I'm trying…" was the best he could manage.

From the perspective of the two men in the control tower the shattering impact of the lightning strike accompanied by an incredibly bright light had momentarily wiped out their awareness of anything. Both controllers realized simultaneously that they were lying on the floor without a clear memory of how they got there. They rose quickly to their feet as the lights of ScotAir 50 punched through the black clouds on the approach end of the runway.

"Radios are off-line!" one of them said.

"What's he doing?" the other replied, gesturing toward the end of the runway. The approaching jetliner appeared to be almost hovering off the end of the airport, its nose pointed not down the runway, but toward the bay as the pilots fought to stay aligned in the powerful crosswind.

Without warning, the jet began dropping at a frightening rate, its nose pitching up as it gained speed toward the ground.

"What the…?" One of the controllers grabbed the microphone and punched the button hard, his finger protesting in pain, oblivious to the fact that the radios were not working.

"ScotAir, go around! GO AROUND!"

"Microburst!" the other announced, watching the nose come up even higher as the engines wound up to full power, the angry smoke trails of maximum thrust pouring out of the tail end of the Boeing.

"He's gonna hit!"

Scott felt the welcome thrust of the Boeing's tail-mounted engines kick the small of his back as he pulled on the yoke, his eyes riveted on the attitude indicator as the airspeed began to rise. An eerie calm had engulfed him, a feeling of being along for the ride and not in control—as if he were standing off to one side and watching the struggle to stay airborne with nothing more than detached interest.

"Ten feet, Scott!" Doc's words broke through. Scott could see trees in the distance to the left, buildings to his left, the grass along the runway flashing by in his peripheral vision. They seemed just inches above the ground.

"One hundred thirty knots and rising!" Jerry announced.

Scott continued to concentrate on what was only the bare hint of a climb, just as a massive gust from the left caught him by surprise.

Instantly the right wing dropped as the 727 weathervaned into the wind. The sound and feel of metal scraping concrete and the sudden lurch of the jet to the right as the right wingtip dragged the runway in a shower of sparks was amplified in the cockpit.

The wings were full of fuel. He had to stop the sparks and the impact.

Scott yanked the control column back hard, instinctively rolling the yoke to the left slightly to lift the wingtip off the ground.

The right wingtip rose from the runway at the same instant the tires of both main landing gear thudded onto the surface at nearly a forty-degree angle, the massive force dragging the Boeing's nose back to the left with a wobbling, shaking effect that Scott had never felt before.

The nose gear impacted the runway a second later as Scott once again hauled the yoke as far back as he dared, feeling the wind pick up the right wing. He fought to keep the wings level amidst the squeal of protesting rubber, realizing they were about to dig the left wingtip into the soft ground alongside the runway.

Everything in his mind was unreeling in slow motion. If the left wing hit, it would embed itself and yank them to the left until the aircraft rolled sideways and broke up in a massive explosion of fuel and flames. He had to get off the runway!

Jamming the rudder almost full right, the control wheel full right, and the yoke in his gut, Scott felt his ship suddenly leap off the surface and stagger back in the air. It seemed to take forever for the side-to-side shaking and vibrating to cease.

Doc's voice cut through.

"Scott! Come back right!"

A voice in his mind had been screaming the same warning. The control tower was off to their left, and they were drifting over the grass toward it, the tower cab still hundreds of yards away, but growing steadily in size in Scott's side window.

He looked at the airspeed. It was hovering above one hundred thirty, the push of the seat cushion in the small of his back confirming they were accelerating. He had to have speed to climb, speed to bank away from the tower, speed to get out of ground effect…

"Gear up," Scott ordered. "We've got to take the chance it's not damaged."

Doc grabbed the gear lever and moved it to the up position. Scott banked harder to the right, correcting the path of the jet as he tried to nurse it above the altitude of the control tower structure.

A wall of rain and hail and virga descended like a curtain from the east end of the airfield and engulfed them as the 727 clawed for altitude, rising finally above the height of the tower cab and into the fury of the storm.

"Scott, we've got an unsafe gear indication on the left main, but I think it's retracted. I think we can ignore it for now," Doc called out.

"Gear door, or the gear itself?"

"The main gear itself. There's a procedure we could do later to see if it falls out. I'll leave the handle up for now. That'll keep it pressured to the up position."

"Yeah, not now," Scott said.

Doc raised the microphone to his mouth and looked at the captain. "Where do you want to go?"

"Get me a clearance back west, somewhere out of this. Let me get stabilized and I'll talk to the FBI guy again. I don't know where we're going, but I sure as hell don't want to try that a second time!"

Jerry Christian's voice rang in from behind.

"Amen!"

"Agreed," Doc added as he pressed the transmit button and said, "Washington Center, ScotAir Fifty, request." He glanced around at Linda McCoy, who had remained silent, and noticed her death grip on the arm rests and the bloodless white skin around her tightly clenched lips.

She saw his glance and returned it with not even a flicker of a smile.

Doc nodded at her and closed his eyes in a momentary gesture of empathy.

"It's okay, Doctor."

She barely heard him and swallowed hard, aware of a rasp where her voice should be. Her lips felt parched and she realized she had been holding her breath. The big copilot was watching her with concern, and she finally acknowledged him.

"What?" she asked.

"I said it's okay. Relax. We're still airborne."

"That," she said softly, looking directly at him, "is precisely the problem."

Before ScotAir 50 began its approach to Pax River, a series of phone calls had connected the FBI agents at the Pax River meeting with the common purpose decided upon back at FBI headquarters: The occupants of ScotAir 50 were to be arrested, detained, and secured, all in accordance with standard procedure for hijackings, using the assumption that the hijacker—or terrorist—might be posing as one of the passengers or crew. The good guys could be sorted out later.

When the arrangements were complete and the Boeing 727 was within a few miles of the field, Tony DiStefano plunked himself in a chair to listen to the background briefings.

"Okay, Donna. What've you got?"

The tall, attractive woman with large glasses he'd worked with for years sat in a swivel chair next to him and consulted a yellow legal pad overflowing with notes.

"For Dr. Rogers Henry, not many surprises, Tony." She outlined his pioneering background in nuclear weaponry, Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, Sandia, Denver, Lawrence-Livermore, his security clearance, which had been amazingly still intact at his death, a brief history of the Medusa Project and its dismantling, and the lack of any negative remarks on Henry's human reliability file with the National Security Agency, the organization which issued security clearances for Americans in sensitive government research.

"That's it?" Tony asked.

"He had a small police record in Miami after retirement. Two arrests for suspected spousal battering. Both times the wife refused to press charges: 1986 and 1988.

Two speeding tickets. No wants or warrants other than those."

"And the wife?"

"An entirely different matter. Remember, Tony, this man died two years ago, okay? The wife's alive right now and on that aircraft."

"Okay. Meaning what? Does she have a record of some sort?" He arched an eyebrow at the I-know-something-you-don't-know smile spreading across her face.

"No criminal record, and not even a traffic ticket, but listen to this. She met her husband while working at Lawrence-Livermore Labs in California as a nuclear engineer, then married him while working for the government at Los Alamos. She designed assembly methods at Liver-more and worked on trigger production design at Los Alamos. In other words, this girl knows her way around nuclear weapons."

"So"—Tony raised both hands in the air in a gesture of mild frustration—"where is this going?"

"Her husband has been dead for two years. Since he isn't around, he doesn't have a motive for threatening his country with an alleged bomb."

"Okay."

"She, however, does."

Tony came forward in his chair. "What do you mean?"

"The wife's got a whale of a reason to hate the government, and maybe the military. Five years ago she divorces her husband. In the divorce, she's awarded half his retirement, and a survivor annuity, which is considerable money. She lives reasonably well on the retirement income until her ex-husband dies. Then she files for her survivor annuity, which should roughly equal what she was getting for her share of the retirement. But those wonderful humanists over at the Office of Personnel Mis-Management find a typo in the court order and cut her off. I've dealt with OPM, too. They're incompetent idiots. Anyway, OPM happily declares her annuity award invalid, and since the husband is dead, they won't let her go back to the divorce court for a corrected order, even though the annuity was clearly hers. It's an outrageous decision, but she fights the OPM for the last two years and gets nowhere. Just a month ago a U.S. Court of Appeals turns down her appeal without comment and permanently takes away her annuity. This week she puts her home on the market, perhaps because she can't pay the overdue property tax. Today, suddenly, she ends up on an airplane over Washington, D.C., with a mysterious device, alleged to be nuclear and said to be ticking."

"Alleged to be nuclear? Donna, you're forgetting the readings in Miami."

"No, I'm not. We're just assuming the nuclear material that caused those readings is on that airplane. In fact, there are other alternatives, as you pointed out. Several other airplanes weren't searched in time, and trucks went out in all directions from the airport in the same period. Bottom line? We could be chasing the wrong fox. It could be a coincidence. This scientist's wife gets ready to pull off an airborne extortion with a nonexistent weapon, and by dumb luck some terrorist ships some plutonium through Miami at the same moment."

"That's a real stretch."

"Then maybe it's real. The bomb, I mean. That is also a possibility with her."

"Not plausible, Donna. This is a widow running out of money, so she spends her remaining funds to blow up the world? I don't smell suspect here."

Donna leaned over to put her face in his as she aped a Brooklyn accent.

"Hello-o? The husband is dead, Tony. For two years now. Still dead! The only living human with a motive is Vivian Henry."

Tony smiled and studied his shoes for a second before looking back at her.

"Okay, then where's the demand for money? There've been no demands."

Donna straightened up, her eyes still flaring but her voice more subdued. "Maybe it's coming. Maybe that is a real bomb and she's suicidal and intends to take out as many as she can to pay back official Washington. Who knows?"

Tony raised the palms of his hands to stop her. "Okay, okay. She has a motive, but we don't know that she's got the intention, the anger, the capability…"

"Oh, she's got the capability, all right. As I told you, she worked in the nuclear bomb arena at Los Alamos and there's every reason to believe she knows how to construct a dummy nuke. I just talked to the Nuclear Regulatory people out there. They're pulling her files, but they confirm that someone with her pedigree married to a key physicist like Henry would probably be able to build a real one by herself as well. It's plausible, Tony. On top of that, we've got talking computers issuing threats on that airplane, and she uses computers extensively."

"How do you know that?"

"The standard sweep. She has accounts with CompuServe and America Online and uses them daily. We checked her account billings and they're pulling all her records."

Tony got to his feet and walked to the window, shoving his hands deep in his pockets as he thought through what Donna had said. He had thought of everyone aboard the ScotAir jet as a victim. What if the perpetrator was aboard pretending to be a victim? What would her plan be? What would she want? Money? Or maybe she was suicidal.

Tony turned. "Has she ever threatened violence?"

"We don't know yet. We've secured the entire file from OPM, so after we comb through it, I should be able to tell you if there's anything in writing, and to buttress that, we're trying to reach some of the OPM employees who dealt with her."

Tony turned from the window. "Okay, there's one problem. The bomb thinks it's in the Pentagon, and I got word a few minutes ago that she had, in fact, hired a flatbed truck to take her cargo—the bomb—from National Airport over to the Pentagon. The OPM is downtown, a couple of blocks from the White House. Now, if I wanted to blow away the OPM, why would I take my bomb to the Pentagon?"

Another agent had been listening quietly. He moved forward slightly and raised a finger to take the floor.

"I think I can answer that."

Tony DiStefano cocked his head slightly. "Go ahead, Bill."

"I've been digging into her background, too. Vivian Henry waged a quiet but rather energetic campaign in the late seventies to get the Energy Department and the White House to reactivate her husband's research project. She lobbied extensively on Capitol Hill, wrote letters to the editors of various defense journals, and from at least one archived news report was very bitter over her husband's being put out to pasture."

"But why the Pentagon?" Tony tried again.

"Because the young presidential advisor responsible for convincing the President back then to kill the Medusa Project—an individual Mrs. Henry called a Machiavellian liar in a Senate hearing—now has his office at the Pentagon. These days, however, he goes by another title."

"Which is?"

The agent smiled. "Secretary of Defense."

Tony nodded thoughtfully. "And a nuclear detonation at the Pentagon would get OPM too, not to mention the rest of us."

"That's right," Bill agreed. "Hell hath no fury…" The agent suddenly glanced at the more senior female agent and stopped in midsentence. She smiled at him, knowing the words he'd choked off, and why.

"Like a woman scorned, you were going to say?"

He nodded sheepishly.

"Believe it!" she said.