Medusa's Child

FOURTEEN

Donna reappeared with a new set of faxes.

"You ready? I've got the rundown on two of the crew."

"Go ahead." Tony sat down hard and began rubbing his forehead again.

"This is on the copilot. Name is John Turner Hazzard, nickname 'Doc,' age sixty-three, born in Conway, Arkansas, son of a Methodist minister, served in the Marines as an enlisted man in Korea, honorable discharge 1953, learned to fly on the G.I. Bill, and joined Pan American World Airways in 1956 after numerous flying jobs. Served as a Pan Am pilot and captain until the company's bankruptcy in the eighties. Earned a bachelor's degree from Southern Illinois University in '89 and an M.B.A. from Syracuse in '92. Married three times, divorced three times. No history of domestic violence. Unblemished FAA record. A few traffic tickets in recent years and an outstanding parking ticket in 1983, but no DUIs or other serious matters. No FBI record, no wants, no problems. FAA reports jobs in aviation since Pan Am are too numerous to itemize. Currently lives by himself in Colorado Springs, Colorado."

"Hardly suspicious. Height and weight?"

"Big fellow. Six-foot-four, two hundred twenty pounds at last FAA physical."

"And a Marine. Good. Who else?"

"I've got the flight engineer. Name is Gerald Donald Christian, nickname Jerry, age forty-three, born in Topeka, Kansas, no information on his family, graduated University of Kansas with a B.A. in 1975, private pilot license 1975, aircraft mechanic rating 1976, joined Northwest Airlines 1976. Terminated by Northwest in 1985 for unsuccessful performance in training. FAA record of a nonfatal accident in 1983 in a small plane, otherwise it's unblemished. He has no FBI record, no military history, no wants, et cetera. Christian is married, three children, and lives in Dallas with them. Bankruptcy filing in 1989. No DUI or other traffic offense history."

"And the captain?"

"He's recent military. It's coming. Give me fifteen minutes."

One floor above the Situation Room the National Security Advisor and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs huddled in a hallway for an urgent private exchange. The four-star Army general had rushed over from the Pentagon ten minutes before.

At five-feet-five, the National Security Advisor had to crane his neck to look the six-foot-two-inch general in the eye, but he did so with the commanding authority of someone who has the ear of the President.

"Okay, John, we're out of earshot. What is it?"

"We've found the Special Forces people we'd need, Stanley, to fly the airplane, if we can't defuse the weapon, but…"

"You mean to fly it offshore, bail out, and let it detonate in the air somewhere east?"

"Yes, and the Air Force is prepared to use a cruise missile to bring it down at a safe range. Otherwise, you know, there's Bermuda out there and God knows how many merchant ships. We've even got a carrier fighting its way south around the hurricane. Damned inconvenient timing."

"So what's the problem, John? Why are you in my face?"

"We need that weapon."

The shorter man removed his glasses as if they were getting in the way of seeing the general clearly. "You what?"

"If the scientist who built that thing really succeeded in creating a Medusa Effect weapon, we need to know what's inside and how it works. We need to try to salvage it by defusing it instead of blowing it up or dropping it in the ocean. To go with that plan, we'd have to launch that Boeing over the Atlantic with at least one hour remaining on the bomb's clock. We estimate we can defuse it in one hour."

"John"—the White House official shook his head and clenched his jaw—"you're saying you want to play a game of chicken with an armed thermonuclear weapon on U.S. soil? Do you know how goddamned lucky we are it didn't go off over your office already? Do you realize the potential loss of life involved here? Do you realize the history-altering potential of this thing if we make a mistake?"

"I very well understand the risks."

"I'm not so sure you do. Do you also know this story just hit the airwaves? You do know, don't you, that we can't stall the media forever on what we're planning to do?"

"I'm aware of all that, but there's a big national security interest in this."

"And I'm the National Security Advisor, but just… just a second!" He raised his hand in a stop gesture. "What are you military guys going to do if you can't defuse it? Are you planning to blow it up with seven seconds remaining like James Bond, for God's sake?"

"That was Goldfinger, 1964, Stanley. Great movie, but Bond didn't blow up the bomb at Fort Knox, someone else came in and turned it off. If we can't defuse it, then with ten minutes left we'll detonate the high explosives and destroy it."

"And if you're wrong?"

"We've had these contingency plans for decades for stolen nukes or compromised weapons. Burning is less precise, so we've already got the high explosives en route to the base. We'll be wiring up the explosives as the disposal squad is trying to turn off the bomb's timer."

"Suppose the clock is lying? Suppose it goes off early, devastates our economy, kills a million folks in North Carolina, not to mention your people, when we could have had it go off safely over the Atlantic? You want to take that chance, John, just to study it?"

"We do. We think it's vital we have that technology."

"Why vital? We're not at war with anyone currently, in case you hadn't noticed."

The general sighed and looked down the corridor before glancing at his feet and deciding how much to say.

"Okay, Stanley, in a nutshell, by the late seventies we were pretty sure of two things. One, our major facilities— military and civilian, communications and power grids— had been hardened adequately against electromagnetic pulses from nuclear explosions. Second, we were pretty sure there was no such thing as a Medusa Wave."

"And now you're not so sure?"

"And now nearly two decades have passed and our society is vastly different. Our communications networks and just about every industry—not to mention the average American home—are dependent on computers. Most of the work we did before to harden the nation's infrastructure against an EMP in the sixties and seventies is now useless. We're very, very vulnerable to even an ordinary EMP in this country. You wouldn't even need a Medusa Wave to wipe out all the computers. Do that, and there goes the entire financial system."

"I didn't know that. I'd read about EMPs years ago. I thought we were hardened. You're saying if Medusa is unleashed, a thermonuclear tragedy is the least of our problems?"

"Absolutely. And I don't want to think what happens if the technology should fall into someone else's hands."

"But why, John, have you fellows all of a sudden decided a discredited theory is now a viable fact? You canceled this program two decades ago!"

"Two decades ago we didn't have anyone claiming to possess a working model. In addition, several top secret studies in the late eighties reopened the debate suggesting that the Medusa Effect was real and achievable, after all. My predecessors did nothing about it, but now…"

"So if it's not really a Medusa weapon, you don't need to study it, and we could detonate it offshore. But if it is a Medusa, we need to keep it right here so you can study it to prevent someone else from threatening us in the future. Interesting situation, don't you think?" The National Security Advisor chuckled as he rubbed his forehead. "We don't need enemies. We're threatening ourselves. Answer me one other question, John."

"Go ahead."

"Could this dead scientist really have obtained explodable nuclear material? I thought we could rely on you fellows to keep the stuff locked up."

The general let out a long sigh. The memory of a briefing many months before came to mind, a briefing only given the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs. It had been a frightening eye-opener relating to the past security of nuclear bomb production in the United States, and a military secret not even the White House was supposed to know: Not all the fissionable material in the military's hands was accounted for. He suspected the Energy Department had similar secrets about their stockpiles of plutonium.

"Stanley, we have to assume it's possible. Not every human reliability system is perfect, and this Dr. Henry was the chief of the project, with unlimited access. Did his superiors account for every molecule of enriched material? You'll have to ask them."

The shorter man nodded with a rueful expression as he watched his taller colleague squirm, knowing exactly what had been left unsaid.

"Okay, John. I'll relay your recommendation to the President. He may want to sit down with all of us shortly. When does the team leave Pax River?"

"Momentarily." He looked at his watch. "They should be lifting off right now."

The wide-eyed Navy lieutenant in the left seat of the Grumman S-3 twin-engine transport remembered launching his craft into a frightening storm from the deck of the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy just two months before. With the combined speed of the ship and the forty-knot gale, the winds over the deck had been at eighty knots, less than he now faced from the land-based airport at Pax River. But then he'd had the comforting kick of a steam catapult in his back. This time all he had were the plane's engines to launch him into the teeth of a hurricane, and the task seemed slightly suicidal.

He'd received his orders at the command post by phone from the Pentagon to carry a small group to Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina, but no one would tell him the reason why. He'd tried to explain how dangerous the weather had become, but the admiral on the other end wasn't listening to any excuses, and no one seemed interested in his opinion. Five Navy and two FBI personnel were going to be risking their lives and his, and he didn't even know why.

Taxiing had been brutal. The aircraft had been spun around and nearly pushed off the taxiway. With a combination of brakes and power, he fought the gusts to a draw and finally got the aircraft into position at the end of the runway. He was aligned with the runway now, the wind howling at over seventy knots from the right, and it seemed he could probably just push the power up, pull back on the yoke, and lift straight up.

In any event, it would be a short ground roll.

"Ready?" he asked his copilot. A pair of frightened eyes stared at him with feigned equanimity as the lieutenant jg nodded.

He pushed the power up, verified that both engines were steady, and released the brakes. The aircraft seemed to stagger forward, then lift off suddenly, as he struggled to hold the nose down to gain real speed. They headed toward a dark mass of clouds crossing the far end of the field with pelting rain washing over them as the altimeter began to wind up.

"Gear up," he ordered. The copilot positioned the gear handle as he banked the craft to the left, heading north. The weather radar was useless, a mass of red-colored splotches covering the screen and warning of violent weather no airman should be trying to penetrate. He'd tried to make sense of the radar picture before takeoff, but the entire sky was filled with what looked like severe thunderstorm activity, and the presence of a small hook-like appendage on the end of the massive cell to the north of the field had escaped his attention—until now.

With the force of a thousand freight trains, the unearthly howl of winds spinning in excess of three hundred miles per hour reached both pilots' ears simultaneously as the Grumman entered the side of a tightly packed tornado funnel at a hundred and ninety knots and instantly flipped sideways, exceeding by several hundred percent the maximum design loads for the structure as the wings and the tail were ripped from their fittings and flung away in a cloud of aluminum parts. In the same split second, the right engine tore free, the propeller blades stitching a series of gashes in the disintegrating fuselage as it flung itself into the void. The main body of the aircraft, deprived of its structural integrity, split open and exploded into shards of metal as the bodies of those inside became lifeless projectiles in the maw of the funnel. In less than two seconds, what had been a flying machine was nothing more than a grisly rain of debris falling to the north of the base.

On the radar screens in departure control, the flight suddenly became a collection of targets, then disappeared along with the transponder. In the tower the visibility to the north was nil. Repeated radio calls went unanswered. It was nearly three minutes before the tower controllers concluded jointly that the Grumman and the nine souls on board were history.

The tower operator picked up his crash phone as the chilling sound of an emergency locator beacon began broadcasting its plaintive wail through the tower's speakers.

Linda McCoy had been on her way to the cockpit when Scott McKay met her in the passageway.

"Scott!" She grabbed his arm and motioned toward the rear with a toss of her head. "It's reeling off more warnings. You need to hear this."

He followed her quickly to the rear of the third pallet. Vivian Henry was standing now, arms folded, her eyes glued to the screen a foot in front of her, but maintaining her distance, as if touching the loathsome thing would contaminate her. She glanced over as Linda and the captain came into view.

"He's repeating the same warnings now, over and over, but I don't understand."

Scott moved beside her and read the message scrolling across the screen.

Linda watched Scott McKay step back slightly. His face carried a dazed expression and he seemed totally preoccupied.

"You see what I mean?" Vivian began. Scott didn't answer. His attention remained entirely on the screen.

Vivian turned instead to Linda. "What I don't understand is, he says it can detect movement, but all we've done since it activated is move. Up, down, sideways, and back."

"Oh Lord!" Scott's voice cut her off, and just as suddenly he looked from Vivian to Linda and back with embarrassment.

"What?" Linda shot back.

A sudden jolt of turbulence threw them all off-balance. Linda grabbed a cargo strap, but Vivian tumbled to the right and Scott almost lost his balance as he reached out to catch her. When the aircraft had steadied, he caught Linda's eye.

"It was nothing, Linda. Just a thought," Scott explained.

"How about sharing it?" she prompted.

Scott again looked from Vivian to Linda and back.

"Okay. This thing claims it can detect motion, but it obviously can't, and it still thinks it's in the Pentagon. I'll bet anything it has an inertial navigation system in there and the program froze somehow when it detected we'd reached the Pentagon's coordinates."

"Meaning?" Linda asked.

"Meaning we could throw the damn thing overboard or move it anywhere and it wouldn't know the difference." Scott looked at Vivian. "I don't know whether your ex-husband was bluffing or not. You said he never bluffed, and you may still be right. It could be his device has malfunctioned. But this damn thing sure as hell cannot detect motion. You're right about that, Vivian."

Vivian Henry suddenly moved forward to the open screen and read it once more. She turned with a strange expression on her face, her eyes looking beyond the captain toward the rear of the cabin.

"All those years, I believed every word Rogers told me because he decreed I had to. I think… I think it's time I stopped believing him."

She began walking slowly toward Linda and Scott, then past them, moving steadily to the rear of the otherwise-empty cargo cabin. She was several feet past when Scott realized what she was doing.

"Vivian! The distance to the pacemaker isn't the same thing!"

"I refuse to believe him," she said, her voice surprisingly strong and audible over the noise of the slipstream.

Scott could see Linda glance at the Medusa weapon, then back at Vivian, alarm showing clearly in her eyes.

Vivian was ten feet away and moving steadily. She passed the fifteen-foot point and continued without hesitation as Scott held his breath.

There was no sound from Rogers Henry's contraption. No indication of a response. Scott remembered Doc arguing that the pacemaker threat might be false. Maybe he was right.

Vivian was twenty-five feet away, moving steadily toward the rest rooms at the aft end of the cabin.

If that threat was a lie, too, Scott thought, maybe we can assume the whole thing is a hoax. He let his mind wander for a second. How would he feel if it turned out to be a hoax? How would it feel to know that they'd been goaded into trying a near-suicidal landing at Pax River for nothing?

Vivian reached the rear of the cabin and put her hand on the door to the aft airstairs. She turned then, slowly, the hint of a smile showing on her face, the first smile Scott could remember seeing since she'd come aboard.

He felt himself breathe again and heard a nervous chuckle from Linda.

Vivian held out both arms and bobbed her head to the side, as if taking a bow and acknowledging success.

"You were right, Vivian!" Scott yelled, the sound of his voice echoing in the empty interior of the aft cargo cabin until it was drowned out by another sound that originated behind them, from the direction of the Medusa device.

"Vivian Henry has moved more than fifteen feet from this device in violation of my orders!"

Rogers Henry's computerized voice boomed.

"You were warned. She must physically touch this device in the next five seconds to avoid immediate detonation."

Vivian was instantly in motion, sprinting forward, racing toward the device. She shot past Scott with wide-eyed terror on her face and threw herself at the back of it, her arms cushioning the impact as she fell against the metal surface.

"Your return has been detected, Vivian."

The voice sounded as soon as she touched the surface.

"But you disobeyed me. Detonation will now occur in thirty seconds. Reflect on the millions you'll now be responsible for slaughtering. You made a fatal mistake, Vivian."

Another disembodied sound—an expressionless computer voice—began counting backward as Linda and Scott looked at each other in helpless panic.

"Twenty-eight, twenty-seven, twenty-six…"

The sound of Vivian's voice rose in the background as an anguished counterpoint. "No! Damn you!"

"Twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one…"

Linda McCoy sprang into motion, launching herself at the back of the device. She pushed Vivian aside and reached inside to begin punching the attached keyboard with any combination she could think of, trying desperately to get a response.

The voice continued, relentlessly and unchanged:

"Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen…"

Scott felt time dilate as his mind raced ahead. They'd been overconfident, made a fatal assumption, pushed the device too far. It was too late to reconsider. There was no one to reason with. The possibility that he was about to die loomed before him as a reality.

Doc and Jerry! If they were all going to die, perhaps he owed them a few seconds' warning. There would be no time for an explanation. He might be able to reach the cockpit if he broke and ran…

Doc's words from a half hour before suddenly came back to him like a thunderbolt. "The bastard wanted to torture her," Doc had said. "He wouldn't just let it end like that. He'd warn again and again, just to keep her scared."

As Vivian Henry sank to her knees in tears, her fists impotently pounding the unyielding stainless steel of the container, and Linda McCoy continued punching the keyboard with maniacal determination, Scott realized it was all happening precisely as Rogers Henry had planned.

"Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen…"

With a sudden calm deliberation, Scott moved forward and placed his right arm through the same opening, grasping Linda's right hand and moving it off the keyboard. She looked up at him frantically, as if he'd lost his mind, as the computer voice continued unfazed.

"Ten, nine, eight…"

"What are you doing? Let me go!" Linda yelped at him. "Nothing's going to happen, Linda!"

"Six, five…"

"We've got to stop it!" she yelled, trying to pull her arm away from him.

"Four, three, two…"

"It's all a bluff, Linda!"

"One."

Silence.

Linda McCoy froze. Her eyes searched Scott's for an answer. She looked at the Medusa weapon, and then at Vivian, sobbing softly on her knees.

Except for the slipstream, there was no other sound from the device for nearly thirty seconds.

Finally the computerized voice of Rogers Henry returned with a single word:

"BOOM!"

The screen returned to the original countdown in silence, the numbers 01:57:00 showing clearly.

Linda closed her eyes and wavered for a second, leaning against Scott and grabbing his shoulders for support. He held her awkwardly for a moment, then pulled her to him and hugged her tightly.

She laid her head on his shoulder, and he could feel her shaking inside.

Finally she straightened up and pulled back, discreetly clutching his hand.

"I'm so embarrassed…"

"Don't be," Scott said softly. "I thought we were dead, too… at first. At least you were doing something about it."

She searched his eyes. "How did you know?"

"Something Doc said earlier in the cockpit. As usual, he was right."

They looked in each other's eyes for a few seconds, Linda still holding on to Scott's hand, before both turned to help Vivian to her feet. They steadied her between them until she insisted on sitting down on the same blanket she'd occupied before.

"You see how it is?" she said. "He wasn't bluffing. He always wins."

Both Linda and Scott knelt beside her.

"But he was bluffing, Vivian. We're still alive."

"He wasn't bluffing about my pacemaker. He's still going to kill me. He just wants to enjoy it."

Linda McCoy cupped Vivian Henry's face in her hands and forced her to meet her eyes.

"Vivian, listen to me. Rogers Henry can't enjoy anything. He's dead! Understand? This is just a device he programmed, that's all. We can beat it, because it malfunctioned. It doesn't know it's been moved. That, and knowing he wants to torture you, gives us opportunities."

Vivian smiled slightly, patted Linda McCoy's hand, and looked away, unaware of the captain's puzzled expression. What opportunities could she possibly mean? What else could they do? It all depended on the group of experts from Pax River now.

Linda replaced and tightened the cargo strap over Vivian's lap. "We're going forward now," she said, "but I'll be back shortly."

The news of the crash at Pax River left Tony DiStefano and his team in shock. While dozens of military and civilian employees scrambled to find someone else with expertise in defusing a nonstandard home-brew nuclear device, the reality had sunk in that their best chance for defusing the Medusa Weapon had probably been lost in the wreckage of the Grumman.

"What do you want us to do, Tony?" one of the team asked quietly after he'd briefed them. Tony DiStefano let out a long sigh and pointed in the general direction of the Potomac River.

"I just got word from the director. The Pentagon is taking over, in order to, as he put it, unify this effort. It's their game now. We just tag along and assist."

"So what's the bottom line? We get blamed for the tornado and the plane crash?" Donna asked.

Tony waved away the question with obvious irritation. "It's a turf war, what else? If it's a nuke, it's military."

"Do they know about the likelihood Mrs. Henry's the perpetrator?" Donna asked.

"You're going to make sure they do, right, Donna?"

"If that's an order."

"It is." Tony looked around, catching everyone's eyes.

"Okay, we've still got to apprehend Mrs. Henry when the plane lands, but the military brass are going to have to deal with the bomb."

"You think they'll screw it up?" Bill asked.

"Were you in the military?" Tony asked.

The agent nodded.

"So was I. Air Force."

"Army here."

"Okay. Given your experiences and your knowledge of how innovative and intuitive and subtle the military mind usually is, do you feel confident about their handling what is probably the most dangerous single weapon and delicate detonation threat to ever show up on the North American continent?"

Bill nodded solemnly. "I see what you mean. But there's still the chance it's not real."

"No, there's not."

The voice caused both men to turn as another agent walked in with a notepad. "Tony, I just got off the phone with the search team from Miami. They swept the Henrys' home and workshop with Geiger counters and protective suits."

"Yeah?"

"They found traces of plutonium, and a lead-lined vault in the concrete floor where this Dr. Henry apparently stored it. There was a container there, too, with NRC markings, and two spare nuclear triggers, both of them highly modified. Preliminary theory is, the registered container with that serial number, which is in deep storage at Hanford, Washington, is probably empty."

"My God!"

Donna was nodding energetically. "I thought so!" She said. "The Henrys had the means, Tony. They had the means and they had the motive. Which means we do indeed have a live one." She reached to call the Pentagon before Tony could suggest it.