Medusa's Child

TWENTY-TWO

About the cargo door, Jerry," Scott said suddenly. "Get ready to tell me again how we could do it."

"Whenever you're ready, I've got the systems and maintenance manuals open back here."

"A few minutes more."

Scott banked hard to the left and flew northeast for precisely two minutes before turning back to the right and flying southeast as he dropped the 727's altitude back to five hundred feet.

"Scott, our fuel is not infinite," Doc said.

Jerry was already leaning over the center console with the aircraft's performance manual. "We need to get higher, much higher, if we're going to get any range. We've got thirteen thousand pounds of fuel remaining. That's barely enough for ninety minutes at cruise, Scott, but if we stay low like this, we're talking an hour, tops, before we flame out."

"There are fighters back there," Scott said in a steady voice. "They were brought in to hold us on the ground, but they're armed and dangerous, and I bet they'll be chasing us within minutes. If they find us now with no time left, they're liable to get mindless orders to just blast us out of the sky if we won't return. Who the hell knows what those fools in the Pentagon are thinking? We've got to stay low to the water for at least another twenty minutes."

"That's about eighty miles," Jerry said, "and we're flying farther into the hurricane. It's going to get increasingly rough down here,"

Scott nodded. "All right. The cargo door. How are we going to do this?"

Jerry took a deep breath and let it out slowly before answering.

"Okay. Normally we have to be on the ground to get power to the cargo door. While we're in the air, the 'Open Door' switch won't work. However, I've got two possibilities. The cargo door has its own hydraulic system. I've just got to find a way to hot-wire the electric motors and pumps, but I think I can shunt the wiring to get around the ground sensing relays. It won't be pretty, but I think I can do it. The other way is simply to open the rear cabin door. The manual pump handle and selector valve is back there, and I could manually pump it open."

Scott sat in thought for a few seconds. "To get through the back door we'd have to depressurize, and I'd rather delay that as long as possible. How long to hot-wire it?"

"Ten minutes, tops. But that's not the real challenge."

"Go on."

"Once we get the circuit powered, we've got to guess at what airspeed to use for opening, because we want a high enough speed to rip the door off, but not one so high that the door takes most of the top of the fuselage with it."

"What do you mean, Jerry?" Doc asked over his shoulder. "You mean, like that United Airlines Boeing 747 that lost its cargo door and nine passengers south of Honolulu in 1989?"

Jerry was nodding vigorously. "Yes. Exactly. We've got some substantial advantages over that situation, though. For instance, they were pressurized when their door blew. We won't be. That makes a big difference in the opening force. Second, their cargo door was much larger in area, and it flopped into a high-speed airstream. They were zipping along at two hundred eighty knots at twenty-three thousand feet. We'll be low, around, say, five thousand feet, and our door's smaller. When their door blew open, it did so with so much force that instead of pulling loose at the hinge, it peeled the skin of the aircraft back like a tin can. If that happens to us, the fuselage structure could crumple and we could theoretically break up in the air."

"Which, when translated, means we'd be theoretically dead," Linda said. "Wonderful prospect."

"Our most likely problem isn't that," Jerry added quickly. "It's either having the door damage us as it leaves or having it stay on the airplane."

"I don't understand," Linda said. "I mean, I know it's not important that I understand…"

"Yes, it is, Linda," Jerry reassured her. "You need to know what we're dealing with because we're going to need your help every step of the way."

"You've certainly got that," she said.

"Okay," Jerry continued. "If the door opens but stays on, it becomes a giant air surface influencing the control of the aircraft. The ailerons and elevators and rudders out there are all much smaller than the cargo door. If it opened and partially came off the hinge, so it wasn't aligned with the fuselage anymore, and if it, say, was cocked fifty degrees to the relative wind… the air flow streaming by… Scott and Doc might be unable to maintain control."

"And if it tears off?" Linda prompted.

"It could hit the T-tail and damage it, destroy it, or create some other massive control problem we couldn't overcome. In addition, it could feed debris into any or all of our tail-mounted engines and leave us with engine failures, or fires."

"Oh, is that all?" Doc grinned, shaking his head. "Piece of cake!"

With engines running, the lead F-16 pilot had remained in his cockpit monitoring the radio, his wingman sitting just to the right. The short supersonic dash from Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base had been ordered seconds after the Boeing 727 departed without clearance, and they had used a lot of their fuel in the process—a fact that was worrying both of them.

One of the KC-10's had already landed and taxied by, but there was no sign of either the C-141 or the civilian 727, and that was strange.

The major checked his watch. The other transport aircraft should have been there by now.

He looked at his wingman and gave a palms-up sign of puzzlement. The winds had picked up in the past few minutes, and intermittent rain showers were alternately pelting them with rain and small hail, which also had him worried. He glanced at the fuel gauges again, calculating how much fuel they were burning. They had to keep the engines running, since there was no ground equipment at the civilian airport to get them started once they shut down, but the engines were drinking fuel every minute.

"Shark flight lead, this is your number two on button three."

"Yeah, Two."

"What, exactly, are we supposed to do? We don't have enough gas to go very far offshore, unless we take a tanker with us. Do they expect us to escort that C-141 out to sea?"

"I haven't a clue, Two. Maybe we're here for moral support."

"We can't reach the F-16's, sir," the Air Force senior master sergeant explained. "They lost radio contact with their command post when they landed at that airfield. We're calling one of the tankers right now to relay the orders."

A two-star general threw a pencil across the command post and muttered something obscene between his teeth before looking back at the startled sergeant.

"Just… do your best."

"Yes, sir." The sergeant pulled up another telephone receiver and punched one of the buttons on the console before him, cautioning himself not to shake his head or otherwise react to the general's outburst.

A lieutenant colonel had been waiting briefly for the general's attention. He now pulled him into an urgent huddle.

"Sir, there is a magnetic crane in Myrtle Beach, about twenty miles from that airport. The power supply is part of the thing, and it is self-propelled, but…"

"Great! Something's finally going right!"

"No… sir. The crane can only travel at ten miles per hour. The way I figure it, there's virtually no hope of getting it there in time. It's a simple time and distance impossibility."

Pete Cooke's reportorial instincts had cautioned him against leaving the FAA facility, though he was tempted to do so. There was a nation in frantic motion just outside. At first, residents of the Washington-New York corridor had been in shock and wondering where to run against the possibility of a nuclear detonation over their heads, unsure whether it was real. But when ScotAir 50 and its lethal cargo had been reported heading away from the Beltway, the public's attention turned to the Medusa Wave the media kept describing. People began frantically shutting down computers nationwide and protecting memory and monetary systems as the winds from Hurricane Sigrid began to do real damage to the eastern seaboard.

But Pete's instinct told him to stay put. The core story was ScotAir 50 and how Scott McKay was dealing with the nightmare that had engulfed his plane barely two hours before.

He'd lost his exclusive track on the flight when it flew south and out of range of his radio scanner. He had picked up bits and pieces of reports since then, of course, most of them relayed through the constant phone calls from Ira at his office back in New York. But staying in the air traffic control facility had provided the best intelligence as ScotAir moved south. Several of the men in the control room had tossed him strategic crumbs of information as the drama progressed. He'd been witnessing their efforts to put all air traffic over the continental United States on the ground within ninety minutes.

What a story! Pete thought. I'm in the midst of the biggest, most unprecedented shutdown of American airspace in modern history.

Earlier, someone had come by to tell him ScotAir 50 had indeed been headed to Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base as had been rumored. But then reports circulated that suddenly it had left, and a frantic phone call to the FAA system command center from Washington Center confirmed that the Air Force was now aggressively searching for the 727.

Pete looked at his watch for the hundredth time in the last half hour. He had programmed one of the digital functions to count backward to the detonation time announced on Rogers Henry's weapon.

The numbers now stood at 00:49:00 remaining.

He sat back in a swivel chair and tried to think. The voice of Scott McKay was still in his ears, and he wondered what could possibly have happened. Was he down? Was he running, and if so, to where?

"Pete?"

One of the facility directors had appeared beside him. Pete hadn't heard him coming.

"Yes?"

"We just got word from the Pentagon that they need help tracking ScotAir."

"Where do they think he is?"

"Heading out over the Atlantic. They think he's going to try to dump the bomb himself, which means he might get it as far as two hundred miles out before it explodes."

"Can he do that? Can he dump it in flight?"

"From a Boeing 727, you mean?" the director asked.

"Yeah."

"Not a chance in the world. What's worse, two hundred miles won't have much of an effect on a Medusa Wave."

"So you're still shutting down the system?"

"No choice. When that thing goes off, any aircraft flying that's got a single computer circuit on board is in trouble."

"You'll make it in time, though?"

He nodded. "We will. But God help us if we don't have the computers to restart the system tomorrow."

Within two minutes of the call to get airborne, both F-16's lifted into the storm to the north off Runway 5 and contacted their command post directly.

The orders were simple: Find the ScotAir 727, try to establish radio contact, and try to get him to return.

"We're limited on fuel, sir, to about twenty minutes out."

"That's not a problem," the lead was told. "You've only got fifteen minutes in which to find him anyway. If you can't locate him and turn him around in that time, the only task left may be to make sure he doesn't return."

Linda McCoy felt like a broken record in bringing it up, but once again the men around her in the cockpit of the Boeing 727 had forgotten a frightening truth about the specter holding Vivian Henry hostage.

"Even if the device can't sense motion," Linda told them, "if we get it overboard, it will sense that Vivian isn't beside it. I'm no nuclear scientist, but I do know we'll need a thirty to fifty-mile headstart to be safe when it goes off. Without her, it may go off a lot sooner." The washboard turbulence was becoming more difficult to deal with, and Linda tightened her grip on the back of Scott's seat for support as she partially leaned over the center console.

"I was kind of hoping," Scott said, "that we could rely on it to bluff and bluster for a while before exploding. But you're right. We could get everything else accomplished, only to get fried by that little problem."

A sound of metal against metal caused Linda to turn toward the flight engineer's panel. Jerry was partly wedged to the right of it, lying on the floor, his long frame barely contained in the lateral confines of the rear cockpit. He was holding a flashlight and working on the lower part of an opened circuit breaker panel, using two heavy gloves from his flight bag for insulation against electrical shock.

"Don't touch me," he warned Linda, "and if I accidentally latch onto a high-voltage wire, stay back."

Linda looked back toward the two pilots. "Is there any way we could rig a receiver to find what frequency she's broadcasting on?"

"The extra circuit in her pacemaker, you mean?" Scott asked.

Linda nodded.

Jerry's voice wafted up from the floor. "If I had a scanner and a lot of tune, maybe, but not here and now."

Scott sighed loudly enough to get her attention. "Linda, I'm afraid we're working with some limited possibilities. With or without her signal, the bomb may go off when it impacts the water. If so, there's nothing we can do. We'll experience a few seconds of intense light, and that will be that."

They fell silent as Doc continued banking left and right through the increasing turbulence, holding the aircraft at around five hundred feet over the cloud-shrouded Atlantic only intermittently visible below.

Linda unbuckled her seat belt. "I'm going to see if Vivian has any ideas about the pacemaker's frequency. Anything might help."

She stepped over Jerry and opened the cockpit door, aware, somehow, that Scott was watching her. She paused at the door and turned to look at him, surprised at his fleeting smile and the small thumbs-up gesture. She smiled in return and moved into the cargo cabin feeling strangely calm inside.

There was no choice but to use afterburners for the first few minutes, in order to catch up with the 727. Logically, the lead pilot had decided, a civilian crew trying to get as far away from the coast as possible and out to sea would head due east.

He set his course in the same direction.

The fighter's radar had a range of more than two hundred miles, but it was cluttered with returns now from massive waves rolling across the storm-tossed Atlantic for a hundred miles east of the Carolina coast. Echoes from two Coast Guard aircraft had popped up a bit to the south, but there was no sign of the Boeing. The two fighters had pulled their engines back to normal cruise when a lone echo began strobing on their scopes, moving first to the northeast, then to the southeast, and showing very low to the water.

"That's got to be him," the major said on the intercom frequency. "It looks like he's trying to evade detection."

He plotted an intercept, electing to fly almost directly over the airliner at ten thousand feet, then drop down into formation with him.

The major looked at his watch again. He had been given ten minutes.

He had less than five left.

The target reversed course once more as the major began his descent, flying entirely on instruments with his wingman hanging in five feet from his right wingtip. The single-engine fighters were being tossed around rather substantially, but the intermittent hail was worse. The impacts of the hailstones pummeling the Plexiglas canopy sounded like gunfire.

The two F-16's slid below one thousand feet and the pilots began catching glimpses of the water. At five hundred feet the forward visibility improved slightly, and they closed cautiously to within three miles of the target using nothing but radar before spotting the Boeing.

The leader used a hand signal to alert his wingman, then pushed up the throttle slightly, indicating they would come from the right side and slightly below.

Linda almost expected to see Vivian sleeping when she returned to the back of Rogers Henry's bomb.

Instead, she was writing frantically.

"Let me guess. That's a complaint to the airline about the bumpy ride and the lousy dinner?" Linda teased.

"Especially the dinner." Vivian's smile was more apparent than before. "No"—she gestured to the sheets of paper in her lap—"I'm being positive. I'm writing down everything that's happened, so I can clearly recall it later."

Linda briefed her on the plan for the cargo door and her worries about the pacemaker.

"Vivian, did you have any idea he'd jury-rigged your pacemaker?"

She shook her head. "No, but I remembered something a while ago I'd forgotten. Most pacemakers don't drive TV's crazy, but mine always did."

"TV's? The signal, you mean?"

She nodded. "Not always, but every now and then when I'd get close to a TV, there would be this jumbled pattern of visual noise across the screen which sort of pulsed every few seconds. And then there were his harassing phone calls. He always seemed to know when I was back at my apartment, or for that matter, wherever I was. I'd begun to think he was following me twenty-four hours a day or had hired detectives."

"But it was the pacemaker beacon?"

"Apparently." She nodded. "It would explain things. It would also explain why I had to have the battery replaced so soon."

"I… know a little about radio…"

Linda had knelt beside Vivian, but a sudden lurch of the aircraft knocked her backward, her legs flying unceremoniously upward while she flailed for a handhold. She picked herself up and then sat down, vigorously rubbing what would be a nasty bruise on her thigh where she'd hit one of the cargo floor rollers.

"Ouch!"

"Hold on to my cargo strap, Linda. You were asking me something."

"Yeah. I was hoping against hope, you know, that we might find a way to do what the military said they were going to do, and that's turn on some other radio that would emulate the signal of your pacemaker."

"So we'd have time to get away after we dump the bomb?"

"That's right."

"You don't need to worry about that," Vivian said quietly.

"But we may, Vivian, because it may not bluff this time when it senses you're not there. It may…" Linda paused as she studied Vivian's face and began to discern her meaning.

Vivian had been looking at the floor with her lips pursed. She glanced up suddenly with a look of grim determination.

"There is… a better way, Linda."

Shock consumed Linda's features and the young scientist raised her hand in immediate protest.

"Vivian! You're not going to think that way! There's no way in hell any one of us would consider letting you go overboard, just to…"

Vivian shook her head. "No, no, no! I'm not planning suicide. But I'm not going to let Rogers defeat me so easily this time. No, Linda, that's not what I was going to say at all."

"Well… good… because I… wasn't going to let you."

Vivian reached out her right hand, took Linda's wrist, and began moving it back toward her chest. Linda pulled back slightly, an uncomfortable expression crossing her face, but Vivian tugged harder, her left hand simultaneously fumbling with the buttons on her blouse.

"The pacemaker, Linda. I want you to feel where it is. Have you ever seen one before?"

Linda shook her head. "No."

"Here. Don't be shy. Place your hand on it and feel around the edges. See how close it is to the surface of my skin?"

Linda obeyed, then withdrew her hand self-consciously.

"Yes."

"Well, I figured it out a little while ago. Don't you suppose there's a first-aid kit aboard this craft?"

"I… yes. I'm sure there would be. Why?"

"Because you're going to perform some minor surgery on me and remove that thing."

"I'm what?"

"You heard me. We're going to take it out, then we're going to tape it to Rogers' bomb, and then, for all its stupid little silicon brain knows, I'm going out the door with it."

Linda looked from the device back to Vivian.

"Can we do that?" Linda asked. "Won't you run the risk of a heart problem?"

She chuckled. "I daresay I'd run a slightly greater risk of a heart problem if we set off a thermonuclear explosion. No. I will do fine, dear, and it's just a small incision. The pacemaker will slip right out. I'll direct you. I just can't do it myself."

"Vivian, I'm not medically trained."

"Have you ever had first-aid training?"

"Well, yes, but surgery is a tad different."

"Have you ever had to deal with an extremely bad cut or bleeding injury that required you to take instant, decisive action?"

"Yes. My brother almost cut off his fingers once, and I was the only one there."

"How'd you hold up?"

"Fine, until later. I got sick later."

"Okay, then this will be easy."

Linda's startled expression slowly dissolved into a tenuous smile. She reached out and placed her hand on Vivian's shoulder. "You're a pretty tough cookie, you know that?"

Vivian glanced at the bomb, then back at Linda, and smiled.

"You know, I'm beginning to think I really am. And after all those years of believing I was helpless. How about that?"