Medusa's Child

EPILOGUE

The President entered the Air Force One Starsuite and nodded to the assembled military brass in the Pentagon.

"Gentlemen, while we sat it out here at Wright-Patterson, you've obviously had one hell of a night there in D.C., but I'm relieved to hear all your homes and families came through the hurricane intact."

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs glanced at the other officers in the Pentagon Starsuite before looking the President in the eye. "With a few minor exceptions, sir, yes. Many of us had property damage… as you did, for that matter."

The President nodded. "I'm told the West Wing will take some time to dry out, but other than broken windows and some wet carpets, I don't believe we've lost anything of historic value."

He paused and surveyed the grim faces on the other side of the table. "I've been in a meeting for the last hour with the Situation Room on the hurricane damage, but this gathering is about Medusa. So with that, are we ready to brief, John?"

The Chairman inclined his head toward the commander of the Air Combat Command. "Yes, sir, but since General Kinney carried the brunt of the battle yesterday afternoon, I've asked him to fill you in."

Ralph Kinney took a deep breath and rose to his feet as he ran a hand through his dark hair and glanced at his notes. He was acutely aware of the President's fury at the senior Air Force leadership just eighteen hours before, and equally aware of the crushing fatigue bearing down on him from thirty hours on his feet.

He purposely refrained from looking at the empty chair where the Air Force Chief of Staff was supposed to be sitting. The four-star general had been summarily fired around midnight.

"Mr. President, as you well know, the core of the bomb we encountered yesterday was, in fact, what the designer claimed: a twenty-megaton thermonuclear weapon. The key question is: Was this bomb some exotic, electromagnetic pulse weapon as well?"

"And the answer?" the President asked.

"In a phrase, we're not sure. Some very odd things occurred when that bomb exploded, and we simply don't understand what they were, or what they mean."

The President sat forward. "Tell me, General."

"Well, sir, if you detonate a standard warhead within a few feet of sea level at that exact distance from the coast, you'd expect an electromagnetic pulse, and you'd expect it to cause problems to nonhardened electronics. That is precisely what we experienced along the East Coast, and in the air, and at sea. Nothing exotic, just anticipatable destruction of exposed electronics in airborne aircraft, ships in the area, and coastal cities from New York to Charleston. There was massive damage to telephone and telecommunications, and computers of all sorts have been knocked out or at least knocked off-line. The list is already very long, but since Sigrid was battering the coast at the same time and a lot of electrical power was out, we probably won't know the full extent of the damage until offices and banks and municipalities try to boot up their computers. I won't try to catalog everything right now, but you should know that the precautions you took in shutting down transportation certainly worked. We had only one airborne incident, an Air France Airbus 340 inbound to Kennedy that lost all four engines but managed to get them restarted. Everyone else was safely parked when the bomb went off. Same for rail. Switches and signals went nuts, but since nothing was moving, there were no accidents."

"That's good to hear," the President said. "But let me get this straight. While the bomb produced a standard EMP, which caused some damage, it did not produce a so-called Medusa Wave. Is that what you're saying?"

General Kinney shook his head. "I wish it was, sir, but no. There's more. We didn't get the monstrous electronic catastrophe we feared, but we got something unexplained that may be a new phenomenon. Immediately after the explosion and for nearly thirty seconds, there was a sustained and unprecedented ripple in the electromagnetic spectrum that knocked computers off-line as far west as St. Louis and caused disruptions and power surges all the way to California and Washington State. There is no known way that could have happened, but it did."

The President looked puzzled. "So it did produce a so-called Medusa Wave, just a weak one?"

Ralph Kinney glanced at the two scientists sitting beside him before replying.

"Sir, whatever it was, it should not have occurred with a standard nuclear detonation. There is no way, I'm told, that an EMP should have been detectable on the West Coast or anywhere in the Midwest. I've got two nuclear experts here from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, sir, who can fill in some details for you."

"Wait… wait a minute, General. You said the bomb exploded at or near sea level. But the damn thing was dumped out of the 727, what, fifteen minutes before? Why didn't it sink?"

One of the two scientists spoke up, explaining that the stainless steel bomb casing must have stayed intact and remained watertight.

"Is that possible, gentlemen?" the President asked incredulously. "Could it really have fallen thousands of feet, stayed intact, and then floated? It had to have been lead-lined. How could it float?"

The second nuclear scientist stood and offered an answer that was even more vague.

Finally Ralph Kinney got to his feet again, motioning the two NRC men to sit. "Mr. President, let me summarize what these fellows are saying. They can't explain all the reasons why it floated, but the fact is, there's virtually no other reasonable explanation. You see, if the bomb had sunk as much as three or four hundred feet, the water would have absorbed the majority of the EMP, and none of these coastal effects would have occurred. In fact, if it had gone down as much as eight hundred feet, it would have been shielded from us by the wall of the continental shelf. Mr. President, I'm told there is no nuclear device known to man powerful enough to project an electromagnetic pulse from deep beneath the ocean's surface. Therefore, given what this weapon did when it exploded, it had to have been on the surface."

"Or," the President continued, "if it did have such an effect from hundreds of feet underwater, it would mean that the Medusa is a valid theory and a weapon of unprecedented destructive power."

An Army colonel was introduced and began running down a requested damage assessment and describing the process of unsnarling the transportation system. The President sat back in thought, only half-listening.

"Mr. President, the airlines are in a massive state of confusion, with aircraft and crews in the wrong places nationwide. They estimate three days before the situation approaches normal. Amtrak reports they'll need at least three or four days to get back to normal. Communications, except for the Eastern coastline, should be essentially normal within twenty-four hours."

There was a small commotion in the back of the Star-suite and the Army colonel paused and looked around before continuing.

"The Navy reports all our subs—and those of other nations we'd been tracking in the Atlantic—have all reported in without damage."

Once again the colonel stopped and glanced around, aware that someone new had come into the Starsuite: a man in civilian clothes, who was whispering urgently in General Kinney's ear. The Army colonel scowled slightly, then continued.

"Finally, Mr. President, you requested a briefing on both the effect to the economy, and separately on marine life and the ecosystem near the epicenter of the explosion, and we're working on both. We expect there will be some radiation damage, but…"

General Kinney stood up suddenly and moved to the colonel's side, motioning him to be seated. "Ah, excuse me, Mr. President."

"Go ahead, General."

"Sir, we… have a gentleman here from the U.S. Geological Survey, a Dr. Pierson, with information… you need to hear immediately."

The President came forward slowly in his chair. "Go on."

The USGS representative stepped forward to the edge of the table and consulted a sheet of paper in his hand before speaking. He turned to General Kinney, who nodded and gestured to the screen, then turned to look at the President.

"Ah, sir, I have a refined assessment of the position of the weapon yesterday evening when it exploded."

"You mean, the distance from the coast?" the President asked. "The latitude and longitude?"

"No, sir. The depth."

The President cocked his head slightly as his eyebrows inched up. "I thought it was at sea level, Dr. Pierson."

"No, sir. We triangulated using worldwide seismic data. It was considerably below the surface when it detonated."

The President stared at the USGS scientist.

"How far down was it?"

There was a long pause as Dr. Pierson swallowed, glanced at the general again for reassurance, then back at the President.

"A depth of two thousand four hundred feet."

Doc Hazzard unfolded himself from the backseat of the unmarked Lincoln and stood in the front driveway of the White House, looking at the sky. It was an unseasonably cool spring morning, with fast-moving cumulus clouds shooting by in the teeth of a fresh westerly breeze against a dazzling blue sky.

"Captain Hazzard? If you're ready, sir, please follow me."

The rapid walk through the hallways of the White House ended in the Cabinet Room, where Charles Fortner, the Chief of Staff, was waiting.

"Well, Doc, you're looking hale and hearty."

"Senator Fortner, I appreciate your seeing me, not to mention sending the car to National Airport."

"The least I could do. The President was quite sincere when he told all three of you fellows to call us if you needed anything." He motioned Doc to a seat at the ornate Cabinet table. "So, Doc, what can I do for you?"

Doc shook his head. "Not for me, sir. It's for Vivian Henry."

"Is she doing all right? I'm told she's moved to Colorado and joined ScotAir as your operations manager."

Doc smiled and studied the table for a few seconds. "Yes, sir. It's an exciting time for us. Thanks to your and the President's intervention, we got our contract back, and business has been booming. Scott's even out searching for another 727 to lease. That'll make three."

"And Vivian?"

Doc looked the Chief of Staff in the eye. "Senator, are you aware of what started that whole sequence of her flying the bomb to Washington?"

"Doc, just call me Charlie. I haven't been a senator for a long time."

"Yes, sir… ah… Charlie."

"Yes, I'm aware her ex-husband's will wouldn't pay her the remaining insurance funds unless she did so. Correct?"

"Essentially, yes. And those were finally paid over, even though the estate lawyer wanted to deny them for several weeks because she didn't actually deliver the bomb and wipe out Washington."

"You're kidding!"

Doc laughed and shook his head in amazement. "No, so help me. It took a district judge down there to change the lawyer's mind."

"So what remains, Doc?"

"Her pension. You knew the OPM denied it, fought her all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals, and she lost there. The court order had been poorly drawn, and for that she lost everything."

Fortner nodded slowly. "And you want to know if we can do anything about it?"

"I've looked into this, sir. I don't know what can be done, if anything, but this just isn't right. It's legal pettifogging, stealing an annuity she more than earned because someone over whom she had little control didn't use the right magic words. For a woman as wonderful and loving and as abused and battered as she was to be treated this way by her government…"

Charles Fortner cocked his head slightly and smiled as he studied Doc's face, which was showing a tinge of embarrassment.

"Why, Captain Hazzard, I do believe you have a special feeling for this lady!"

Doc couldn't suppress a smile in return. "You're damned right I care for her, sir. I'd marry her in a second if she'd consider it."

"And you're wearing her down, I hope?"

"Trying. Trying hard."

Fortner looked at a folder of documents Doc had slid across the table, then glanced up as someone came into the room behind Doc.

"Doc, I've read about Vivian's victimization by the OPM. Now, I'm not sure what we can do…"

A familiar voice from behind caught Doc by surprise.

"But we'll look into it immediately and fix it if we can. I hate bureaucracy, too!"

Doc looked around to see the President behind him and jumped to his feet.

"Mr. President!"

"Sit, Doc. You too, Charlie." The President shook Doc's hand and sat down in the chair next to his. "I want you to fill me in on all this in a minute and join us for lunch, but I also want to tie up a loose end."

"Sir?"

"When we had all five of you here for the appreciation ceremony in the Oval Office, I had only the preliminary results of the internal investigation I'd ordered into the FBI's conduct during the crisis. Their attempt to arrest Vivian Henry aboard the Eisenhower after your landing was embarrassingly stupid, and that's why I got involved personally before you reached Norfolk. But what we could never seem to understand was what had convinced the FBI that afternoon that Vivian wanted to blow her government away. Do you know what it was?"

"No, sir. She assumed—we all did—that it was her background as a nuclear engineer."

"That contributed, but no, she was screwed again by the OPM." He related the story of the OPM clerk and her mistaken identification of Vivian Henry as a woman who'd threatened to blow up their building. "The clerk discovered her mistake, but decided not to tell anyone, and the FBI went berserk."

"That clerk, by the way," Charles Fortner interjected, "is history."

"I appreciate knowing that. I'll tell Vivian."

"By the way, Doc," the President said, "how's your flight engineer doing? Jerry Christian, was it? I was glad he could make the ceremony, even in a wheelchair, but the man was in pain."

Doc smiled slightly. "Thanks for asking, sir. Jerry will appreciate that. There… was a question of his walking again, but he's surprised all of us. Last week he discarded his cane, and we think he'll be back on flying status in another month."

"Great news," the President said as Charles Fortner nodded in agreement. "Give him my best, and Scott, too."

"I will, Mr. President."

"Oh, and how is Dr. Linda McCoy?"

Doc's smile broadened. "That, sir, is becoming an interesting story."

The off-season around Aspen was an annual financial strain for resort owners, but a window of opportunity for low-cost government-hosted conventions in the rarified air of the Rockies. With global warming a validated worldwide threat, two hundred world-class scientists and their support staffs had gathered in the mountains for an emergency conference on the latest findings.

Linda McCoy had spent three days listening to a dizzying variety of findings and viewpoints and wrangling with her colleagues in discussions that spilled from conference hall to the parking lot and continued into the night before numerous fireplaces in the condominium-style accommodations. Consensus was growing, but the process, as she'd put it the day before, was messy.

Linda, feeling weary, looked at her watch and read six o'clock. There was another evening meeting discussion she'd promised to attend, but her ears were full of words and her mind was numb—which explained the momentary lack of recognition of the young man leaning against the wall in the foyer.

He had obviously been waiting for her, and for a split second, Linda assumed it was another print reporter looking for a hallway interview.

" 'Scuse me, ma'am. You wouldn't know where a feller could find a little companionship around here, would you? Maybe a young lady who'd like to have dinner with a poor hardworking jet jockey?"

"Scott!"

He grinned at her and nodded. It had been three months since their last meeting, an uncomfortable lunch in Boulder when he had made a sophomoric attempt to kiss her on the way to the car. He'd kindled a hurricane of disturbing feelings then that had been diverting her attention ever since, but she regretted pulling away. Perhaps it was all the publicity and the kidding of her colleagues about the prospect of getting together with the young pilot who'd so selflessly saved the country from a nuclear holocaust, but the attention had irritated her into maintaining a cool distance from Scott. They had shared something in that airplane which demanded friendship, but anything more felt too rushed—yet she had wished almost every night since the Boulder meeting for another chance.

And now…

Without a word Linda walked to him with a smile and pulled Scott into her arms, kissing him deeply. His arms tightened around her, his right hand gently ruffling her hair as they lost themselves in each other for a tiny eternity. When Scott slowly pulled away, a small retinue of scientists in the foyer began clapping, a gesture that would normally have irritated and embarrassed Linda.

Instead, she turned with a broad smile and nodded in their direction. "You shall be meeting without me this evening, gentlemen," she said.

"Why's that?" Scott asked with feigned innocence.

"Because we have a lot to talk about and because I've got a wood-burning fireplace I can't wait to try out."

Dr. Louis Benedict placed his morning coffee on the side table and sat carefully in his recliner as he picked up the remote to surf through the morning shows. His seventy-third birthday was past by three days, but the retired administrative chief of the Los Alamos facility had hardly noticed. He was determined not to be depressed, even though he was alone, a widower of ten years' duration from a childless marriage.

He flicked past a familiar image, then returned. It was Pete Cooke, the Wall Street Journal reporter, on Good Morning America, talking about his new book. Louis smiled to himself. He was mentioned in the book, a bestseller called Waltzing Medusa, which was about Rogers Henry and his barely foiled plot to remove Washington from the map and kill Vivian in the process. Pete had sent him a warm thank-you after interviewing him in Santa Fe, and Louis had rushed out to buy the book as soon as it was published. He had quickly found his name inside and was relieved to see that he'd been correctly quoted and portrayed in a way that made him feel good.

Dr. Benedict's attention returned to the television screen in time to hear Charles Gibson asking Pete about the five people on the ScotAir 727, and how they were doing.

"Jerry, the flight engineer, is divorced now and living near the company headquarters in Colorado. His recovery has been slow. There was extensive damage to his right leg, in particular, but there is hope that he'll be back flying very soon." Pete continued with a short discussion on the current activities and whereabouts of the other four who'd been aboard the 727.

"And how about that operations manager in Miami," Gibson was asking, "who, according to you, purposefully misled Scott McKay into thinking that he and his flight crew were responsible for misloading the cargo that contained the bomb, leaving behind the cargo they were supposed to take?" *

"He was fired after he lied to a congressional committee about it," Pete said, "and he's now been indicted for that lie."

"What's the bottom line of this story, Pete? We barely escaped, as you put it in the title of your book, Waltzing Medusa, and the technology is still unknown. We know it was developed by this lone nuclear scientist, but there's no known record of how he did it."

"None," Pete Cooke replied, "and anyone with a modicum of intelligence would never want it to be built, much less used, again. But, predictably, our government is now gearing up to try to discover how to make this very weapon they originally abandoned, with the lame excuse that we must develop it, just in case someone else develops the technology first."

The interview ended with a handshake and wishes for success, but Louis Benedict was lost in thought.

He put down his coffee and got to his feet, padding out to the garage, where his file boxes were stored, remembering something in the package Rogers Henry had sent him a long time ago, the one that contained the drawings of the instantaneous nuclear trigger. There had been a computer disk as well, an old eight-inch floppy. It supposedly contained the same plans, and he'd confirmed that at one time, but he realized that he'd never actually read everything on the disk.

Eight-inch drives had all but disappeared in the late eighties, but he still had an old Radio Shack Model II, and he turned it on now and inserted the disk.

As expected, the files contained the same details about the trigger, and he paged through them dutifully before preparing to take the disk out.

But there was something odd. The disk was indicating full, but the files he had seen were less than a third of the capacity. That meant there were machine files—hidden files—not showing up in the main directory.

Louis searched his memory for the right codes, finally remembering enough to call up information not normally displayed, and a huge file popped into view.

He opened it and found page after page of computer codes. The conversion program was buried in another old file box, and it was 11 a.m. before he found it and sat down before the old screen again to key in the appropriate commands.

Suddenly the screen was filled with drawings and diagrams, formulas and figures—and a narrative addressed to him!

"Congratulations, Louis, you've cracked the none-too-obscure code. What follows is top secret and known only to me. I have succeeded in principle in finding the theoretical basis for Medusa, and all my notes follow for safekeeping. Please do not copy or print this, but store it carefully. If anything happens to me, you will be the only one who holds the key. Use it wisely, but don't forget what we went through to get it."

Louis Benedict exited the program immediately and snapped off the computer, his heart pounding. A major government program had been launched to find precisely what he had in front of him, and if they succeeded, the world would once again be facing a new means of inflicting misery. His hands were shaking as he replaced the disk in its cover and slipped it back in the folder.

The afternoon passed with a leaden pace as he roamed his living room and den, trying to decide what to do. Should he call Pete Cooke? Should he call the Pentagon? Who should know, and when, and how?

By 8 p.m., his normal bedtime, he was still in a quandary, and with a fire burning in his fireplace at midnight, the options finally coalesced into one.

Louis Benedict returned to the darkened garage and retrieved the folder with the disk in it. He moved back to the living room and stood for a second in thought before reaching down to pull back the fireplace screen. With one fluid motion, he tossed the folder into the fire. It landed just short of the nearest flame.

The edges of the folder began to turn brown as Dr. Benedict watched, remembering the years of frustration he'd gone through in trying to keep the Medusa Project alive and give Rogers Henry enough time to find the key. The key was now beginning to smolder before his eyes.

And suddenly that was intolerable.

He quickly reached in and yanked the folder to safety, opening it to verify that the disk had not been damaged. It hadn't.

Dr. Louis Benedict quietly returned to the garage and placed the folder back into its file box, satisfied with the knowledge that it would stay safe—and unused.