Medusa's Child

TWENTY-THREE

The President had been pacing almost constantly for the previous ten minutes, driving not only his aides in the Air Force One Starsuite close to distraction, but also those on the Situation Room side of the telecommunications connection as well.

"That's the downside of this technology," a White House staffer had whispered to a colleague when they were able to slip into the hallway for a few minutes. "Even when the man's four thousand miles away, we get to watch him pace and fret and frown as if he's across the table."

The President repeated his previous traffic pattern and ended the pacing with a heavy landing in one of the plush swivel chairs emblazoned with the presidential seal. He reached for the intercom button to the cockpit.

"Where are we, Colonel?"

"About a hundred miles west of Skagway, and about thirty minutes from meeting the tanker for refueling, sir."

"Thanks."

He turned his attention to the screen and the military aide on the Situation Room side, a chief master sergeant who was wearing a headset and writing furiously.

"Chief, what's your latest information?"

The impeccably groomed NCO straightened up and pulled off the headset.

"Sir, the F-16's have spotted him. They're moving in right now to try to get him on the radio."

"Where are they?"

He checked his notes. "Approximately eighty-five miles east of the shoreline, sir, over the Atlantic."

"And how much time left?"

"Forty-three minutes."

The President sat in his airborne chair aboard Air Force One and drummed his fingers for a few seconds as the chief master sergeant stood ramrod-straight some four thousand miles away in the basement of the White House and watched him. The Situation Room was buried too far down in the White House complex for anyone within to hear the wind howling outside, but Washington, D.C., was beginning to suffer real damage as the winds rose above a steady seventy miles per hour. Dilapidated slums a mere eight blocks from the Capitol to luxurious homes in Georgetown began to shed shingles, doors, shutters, and windows.

"Chief," the President said suddenly, "hook me in again with the Starsuite at the Pentagon."

"Yes, sir." A quick incline of his head to the communications specialist working the master control board, and the other half of the airborne Starsuite switched to the Pentagon. The President suppressed a chuckle. His order had been carried out so fast, the personnel on the Pentagon side had not been alerted the President was "coming" back. Suddenly the Commander in Chief was staring at them across the conference table, projected into the room as if physically sitting there. The reaction was a slightly wide-eyed jump as several officers turned and tried to look as if they had expected him all along.

"Fellows, get your bosses in here, would you?"

The two-star Air Force general appeared, flanked by a colonel and followed by a three-star.

"Check me on this, gentlemen, but if I'm reading my watch right, even if our fighters turned him around right this second, he's twenty-five minutes from the ramp at Grand… where was it?"

"Grand Strand, South Carolina, sir."

"Right. You agree with the time? Until we get him parked, I mean?"

They consulted their watches and each other and quickly nodded. "That's a reasonable estimate, sir."

"Okay. That would leave less than twenty minutes to detonation. Even if we just raced our two pilots onto the airplane and pulled the civilians off, and even if we could instantly solve the pacemaker problem, it would take five minutes to get airborne again at minimum. That's less than fifteen minutes of flying until it goes off. Guys, there's no way in hell we're going to get this plane far enough from the coast if we bring it back now."

The generals exchanged glances.

"We know that, sir," General Kinney said, "but we haven't been able to come up with another solution. The only alternative is to let them go."

The President grimaced and looked away in thought for a few seconds before replying. "I hate to do that. We're sending these folks to almost certain death. But there's no choice left, is there?" He sat in contemplative silence for a few more seconds before coming forward in his chair.

"Okay. I want you to call the guys in the F-16's and tell them… tell them it's time to turn around. If they've made contact with the captain, find out exactly what he's planning to do and wish him godspeed."

"Yes, sir."

"General, also have the pilots tell that captain, if they can…" He looked around at an aide on the Air Force One side of the room. "Is there any way I could talk to them directly?"

One of the colonels in the command post stepped forward slightly.

"Sir, you mean the 727?"

The President nodded. "Yes. Any way we could hook up directly?"

Several quick conversations ensued on the Pentagon side before the colonel turned back to the President.

"Sir, if you'll stand by a few more minutes. Our guys are almost in formation with him. We're relaying now, and maybe we can hook something up through a VHF frequency and air traffic control."

The darkening ocean and ragged clouds that continued to flicker by the copilot's window were becoming all too familiar to Doc Hazzard as they lurched through the turbulence. He had stopped looking for pursuing fighters some time ago, so the presence of two gray shapes pacing them below and to the right of the cockpit had gone unnoticed.

Doc jerked his head to the right suddenly, thoroughly shocked to see two F-16's less than thirty yards away flying in silent formation with the 727 as it bucked and bounced its way through the low-level turbulence of the hurricane.

"Jeez! Scott, they've found us!"

Scott's head jerked right as well.

"What?"

"The F-16's. To the right, and slightly below. The lead's gesturing something."

Scott unsnapped his seat belt and shoulder harnesses and leaned up and to the right until the canopy of the lead F-16 was in view. The hand signals were universally recognizable, and he quickly read the frequency and dialed it into the UHF as he sat down and buckled up again.

"This… should be interesting," Scott said. "I don't see any reason not to talk to them. They're armed, and they've got our address. You agree, Doc?"

"Absolutely, I agree. Those boys could knock us down with any one of those missiles."

Scott keyed the microphone.

"ScotAir Fifty here. You up this frequency?"

The response was instantaneous, the voice the same one Scott remembered from the final approach to Seymour when they'd helped check the questionable landing gear. "Yes, sir. This is Shark Five on your right wing."

"So your orders now are to force us to turn around or shoot us out of the sky, right? Brilliant plan! Thanks to your idiot commanders not listening to us, we're going to have to do this ourselves. Get rid of the damned bomb, I mean."

"We're not under orders to force you back, sir. There's not enough time left anyway for you to return. Please confirm that your status with the device is the same. Is it showing about forty minutes to detonation?"

Linda had returned from the back and was listening. She checked her watch.

"I just checked it, Scott. Nothing's changed. It's showing forty-one minutes."

Scott relayed the confirmation.

"Sir, my command post and the White House want me to ask what you're intending to do, and if there's anything… I mean, I know this is pretty lame… but can we help in any way? We're not here to interfere."

Scott reached over and touched Doc's left arm. "I guess we can stop zigzagging now."

Doc laughed and rolled his eyes at the ceiling. "Sorry. Escape and evasion maneuvers were getting to be automatic. They were staying with us, in any event."

Doc steadied the course to due east as Scott held his finger over the transmit button and looked outside in thought before replying.

"Ah, Shark, you're talking to a former F-14 jockey over here. You can't have a lot of extra gas, so just go ahead and get out of here."

"We're fine for ten minutes more, sir."

"Look, I know this isn't your fault, but now that we've been essentially abandoned, we're going to try to jury-rig our cargo door to open and hopefully rip off in flight.

Then we're going to dump the device out the cargo door and hope it doesn't detonate when it hits the water. If we hadn't been lied to back there at Grand Strand, we could have transferred the thing to a C-141, and he could have dropped it easily. The Air Force tried to spring another trap instead."

"I don't understand, ScotAir," the F-16 leader replied.

"The C-141 back at Grand Strand. There was supposed to be one there. It was obviously another hoax. That's why we're out here now on our own, with a pretty substantial chance of killing ourselves in the process of trying to dump the bomb."

"Sir, they didn't lie to you about the C-141."

"Yeah? We saw the KC-10 on final. That's when we bugged out."

"There was a KC-10, sir, that's true. But the C-141 landed five minutes after he did. I swear to you that's true."

There was silence in the 727 cockpit as Scott realized they had made the wrong assumption. There was no time to repair it now. The die was cast.

He took a deep breath and glanced at Doc, who was watching the instruments and purposefully refraining from a reaction.

"Well, you'd better get out of here, Shark. There's a chance this thing will explode when we dump it out and it loses the pacemaker signal, if you're aware of what I'm referring to."

"We are, sir. We've been briefed."

"Scott?" Linda's voice wafted in like a welcome wave from behind him, and Scott turned, eyebrows raised.

"Yeah?"

"We've got it solved," she said calmly. "The pacemaker, without Vivian, will go out with the device."

Scott turned even farther to study her expression, wondering if she was kidding.

"How?"

"She wants me to remove it. It's a simple surgical procedure, but she says we can do it and she'll be okay without it."

"ScotAir, you still with us?" the F-16 leader asked.

"Yes. Stand by just a second, Shark."

Scott gestured to the cargo cabin. "You're sure it will work?"

Linda nodded. If Vivian was sure, so was she.

Scott punched the transmit button again. "Shark, I think we've solved the problem. The pacemaker will be physically removed and attached to the device before we dump it. Impact with the water is the only variable, other than getting the door off without losing control. We've got to get rid of the two forward pallets first."

Scott thought he heard a small gasp from Linda, but his concentration was on what to say, knowing that every word spoken to the two F-16 pilots would make its way back to the Pentagon.

"When are you planning to dump it, sir? How far out?"

Scott looked at Doc, who shrugged his shoulders.

"We… haven't had a lot of time to plan, Shark. Let's say another hundred miles. However far we can get. We've got to get the door open pretty soon to accomplish this."

"We have a request, sir."

"Yeah. Go ahead."

"Could you come up on a long-range VHF frequency and talk to Washington Center?"

Scott agreed, took down the frequency, and dialed it in. The whole world seemed to know where they were now, Scott thought. Radio silence hardly made sense anymore.

"Washington Center, this is ScotAir Fifty."

The response was immediate.

"Roger, ScotAir Fifty. We have a radio relay on this frequency. Stand by."

What's a "radio relay" in air traffic control terms? Scott wondered.

The next voice in his ear had a familiar ring, but it didn't register at first.

"Is this… Navy Lieutenant Commander Scott McKay, over?"

Scott pushed the transmit button. "Yes. I'm a Reservist these days, but go ahead."

"Scott, I'm calling from Air Force One. This is the President."

Scott instantly felt off-balance, the lethal situation they were in fading into momentary irrelevance at the thought of a call from the President of the United States.

But his situational awareness returned in almost the same instant. They were carrying a nuclear weapon away from the mainland of the United States because governmental incompetence had blown all efforts to help.

The call made sense.

"Yes, Mr. President."

"Scott, you've got a difficult job ahead and I won't take more than a few seconds, but I wanted you to know you were right. We've got positive confirmation now that if we'd tried to blow up that device on the ground at Seymour-Johnson or anywhere else, the full Medusa Wave would have resulted. Your actions saved us from our own stupidity. We've screwed this up and left you out there all alone to deal with it. I'm deeply sorry you got so little help."

"I… thanks for confirming that, sir."

"I don't think we can do anything to help you from here, except with prayers. I'll be standing by. Good luck, Scott. Your President and your country are already infinitely grateful to all of you."

"Sir, that should include Vivian Henry. She had nothing to do with this. She's a victim."

"I understand, Scott. God speed."

They sat in silence for nearly thirty seconds before Scott reached down and flipped back to the UHF frequency.

"Shark? You fellows better get going. Thanks for the relay."

"Good luck, sir."

The two fighters peeled off to the right and disappeared immediately into the murk as Scott placed his hand on the radio control heads.

"I suppose we might as well secure the radios."

"Turn them off, you mean?" Doc asked.

"We're over the ocean, we'll be outside VHF for Washington Center in a moment, and we don't have long-range high-frequency gear. Any reason not to?"

Doc thought about it and slowly shook his head. "No, but I'd keep one of the VHF's on the emergency frequency, 121.5."

Scott nodded his head and adjusted the number one radio before turning off the number two VHF and the UHF.

"There goes our last contact with the civilized world," Scott said.

"Ain't all that civilized," Doc shot back. "Scott, we'd better get some altitude."

"Right. Take us up to ten thousand." He turned toward the empty engineer's seat. "Jerry? How're you coming with that?"

Jerry's voice came from under the engineer's station. "I've got it wired. I was just about to push in one of my jury-rigged breakers. You ready?"

"Go."

There was the small sound of a circuit breaker being pushed into place, a tiny plink of a sound.

"There," Jerry announced. "No sparks, no smoke. We're ready."

"Scott?" Linda said.

"Yeah."

"I… hadn't thought ahead. I forgot about my pallets being in the way. You can't get the bomb to the door without moving them, can you?"

Scott shook his head no.

"I… was pretty sure of that. Scott, I've got two years of hard work in those boxes. Is there any way we could save them?"

Scott's eyes searched hers for a moment, reading the worry there. "We blocked off the forward two pallet positions when we launched this airline, so we could have the option of putting a few passenger seats up front. If those two positions were usable, we could move your pallets forward and out of the way, but there's no way to reconfigure now. I wish we could."

Jerry had already scrambled to his feet and was brushing the layers of dust off his pants. Scott looked at him.

"Am I right, Jerry?"

Jerry nodded and looked at Linda as he pointed to the cockpit door.

"Linda, are there things in there we could pull out? If it's not an impossible size, we could tear down the pallet and relay your gear to the back and try to tie some of it down."

Linda was nodding. "Yes. There are some big pieces, but my computer tapes, the memory drives, and one of the Dobson Instruments, if I could save those, it would be wonderful. I also have a battery-powered cesium clock, but… that can go, I guess."

Scott had been checking time and distance equations in his head. Less than thirty-nine minutes remained.

"You'll have to move fast, Linda. We need to get that door open in no more than, say, ten minutes. The door should be off no later than fifteen minutes from now, which means you've got about fifteen minutes maximum to move your equipment."

"Then let's get going." Jerry was already clearing the door with Linda right behind him as Scott's voice reached her ears.

"I'll be back in a minute to help."

"Go on, Scott," Doc said. "I can handle it alone. You want to cruise at ten thousand?"

"Higher than that, Doc, if needed. Hell, you've been flying these things since before I was hatched. Whatever you think."

"We're penetrating the hurricane even more deeply. I'll try to keep us out of the red echoes, but please be careful back there. It's going to be increasingly violent." Doc looked around as he spoke, but Scott was already out of the seat and through the door. He was alone, and he caught himself glancing to the right and feeling a twang of loss that the F-16's had left.

Okay, we're climbing through eight thousand feet to level at ten thousand, Doc reminded himself, feeling suddenly isolated. Here I am flying solo in a 727 in a hurricane over the ocean with a ticking nuclear bomb aboard. If I didn't already have some great stories for the grandkids, I will now!

His thoughts unreeled at high speed, images of his first wife Betty and their two sons and his second wife and family flashing across his mind's eye—hating the possibility he might never see them again. Of course, they'd miss him, too, absentee father though he'd been. He loved his kids, and he still loved his wives, despite the divorces. Lucy came to mind, his third wife. Unable to conceive, thank God, since together their lives had been a whirlwind of wild sex, wild times, wild fights, and the wrong type of three-ring circus for a kid. Lucy had written just last week—E-mailed him, to be exact. She was dating again, which was good. He was glad they'd stayed friends, even occasional lovers, though if she remarried, the sex would have to end.

Or not. With Lucy, who knew? Describing her as a free spirit was an understatement.

A huge blotch of red on the radar indicating a severe thunderstorm cell appeared thirty miles ahead and Doc altered course nearly twenty degrees to the south to avoid it. The echo was so intense, all echoes behind it were eliminated, meaning there was a solid wall of airplane-eating turbulence, water, hail, and who knew what else churning out there, waiting for a hapless pilot to venture into.

Doc looked at the readout from the navigation computer. The winds were howling from behind now at over a hundred and five knots, pushing them beneficially farther over the Atlantic. He thought about the continental shelf. If the bomb waited to explode until it sank, maybe, just maybe, the water and the wall of the continental shelf could shield the mainland of the United States from the worst of the Medusa Wave.

Linda grabbed Jerry's arm just outside the cockpit and described what Vivian wanted done and what equipment they'd need. "Do you have all that?"

"Yes, we've got a well-equipped first-aid kit. Scott insisted on it. Right by the galley, here."

Jerry leaned over and pulled out the sizable metal box just as Scott came through the cockpit door.

"What did I insist on?"

"The first-aid kit. Last time I looked, it had a scalpel, Betadyne antiseptic, bandages…"

"How long will it take?" Scott asked.

Linda shook her head. "I don't know. She said it would be quick. I'm guessing five to ten minutes."

"How about your pallets, Linda? How much do you need to rescue? I mean, if it's all small boxes, maybe we can relay them behind the bomb and save the majority."

"Some are vital, some aren't. I know what I need, but let's get Vivian taken care of first."

Scott shook his head. "No. Bad use of resources. Take two minutes to help us tear into your pallets to show us what to pull out, then while you operate on Vivian, we'll do our best with the equipment."

A frightening series of bumps and lurches sent all three scrambling for handholds. Instead of subsiding, the turbulence became constant and lightning flashes began illuminating the interior through the cabin windows.

"We're going to have to work fast," Scott told them. "Jerry, grab that crowbar. Do you have a knife for the plastic?"

"Yeah, and shears."

Linda moved ahead of Scott and Jerry around the side of the pallets.

"Just a second," she said, grabbing the first-aid kit from Jerry and disappearing toward the back. In less than a minute she was back.

"I told Vivian what we were planning and gave her the kit. She'll prep herself."

"Which one first, Linda?" Scott stumbled to his right and fell against her. She caught him and grabbed the strap on the first pallet for support.

"This one. My computer tapes are in a metal container back in there."

Jerry began slashing away at the thick plastic sheeting covering the cargo. As he pared it back, Scott pulled it aside and played a flashlight on the stack of cardboard and metal containers.

"How much of this needs to be moved, Linda? You need it all?"

"Not all, no." She scrambled through the plastic and began pulling frantically at the boxes until several metal canisters beyond were exposed.

"The metal carriers. All of the small ones. The big crates are too heavy. Save as many of these cardboard boxes as you can. The second pallet has mostly heavy stuff. I'll… I'll just have to lose it. But the boxes have my research records, and the metal canisters are vital."

As Scott helped her back out of the pallet, the aircraft took a shuddering leap to one side, knocking them all off-balance. Linda fell against Scott and his arms automatically closed around her as he scrambled for footing on the tangled plastic. He gently took her shoulders and moved her away until they were looking at each other in intimate proximity in a slightly awkward moment that seemed to linger.

Jerry waited a few seconds, then canted his head toward the pallet. "Come on, you two."

Linda pulled back in embarrassment and Scott did the same. She gestured toward the rear. "I, ah, better get back there."

"Right," Scott replied.

"I'll keep Vivian to one side so you can get past."

"Okay. Good."

Jerry's voice reached them from within the plastic sheathing. "Let's get this heavy one first, Scott."

Scott turned to help him as Linda moved toward the back, feeling somewhat self-conscious. She'd heard about attractions growing in the midst of great peril, but she'd never experienced it.

If that's what it is, she thought, chiding herself. It's not just Scott. You care about all of these people.

But a very persistent voice in her head was saying otherwise.