Medusa's Child

THREE

Are you Captain McKay?" a female voice asked with a sharpness that belied sultry undertones.

Scott McKay had been studying the left nosewheel tire, his right knee resting on the concrete beneath the nose section of the 727. He turned and shielded his eyes against the sun as he tried to see the face of the young woman standing behind him with her hands on her hips. She was wearing a one-piece khaki jumpsuit and an irritated expression.

"Yep, that's me," Scott said, getting to his feet. He took time to lean over and dust off his pants before straightening up and letting his eyes meet hers, pleased at what he saw.

"Your loadmaster is being an ass, Captain," she said without a smile.

Scott turned to follow her gaze. Jerry Christian, his flight engineer, had been standing in the distance talking to a forklift driver. He saw Scott with the woman and began moving toward the airplane.

"The tall guy over there?" Scott asked.

"That's the one," she replied. "He's refusing to load my cargo. I mean, I know my stuff is not the cargo you're here to transport, but it was NOAA that chartered you, and I'm also from NOAA, and you've got room."

Scott smiled and shook his head. "That's no ass, ma'am. That's my second officer, and he's a really friendly fellow."

"I said he's acting like an ass!" she shot back without humor.

Scott chuckled as he examined his shoes for a second, then looked up and extended his hand.

"Maybe we can start over, if you don't mind. Hi, my name is Scott McKay. And you are?"

Dr. Linda McCoy ran her left hand through her shoulder-length raven hair and let her expression change from a scowl to a slight smile as she shrugged and took Scott's hand and shook it.

"Okay… all right, look, I'm sorry."

"That's all right."

"I'm Dr. Linda McCoy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I'm on a tight schedule and I've been traveling for days from Antarctica and I really don't have the time or the patience for arguments. I got in from Chile at four this morning, and I've got to get my pallets back to Boulder by this evening. I've got time-critical instruments aboard, and I know there's a hurricane about to batter the upper East Coast and screw up air traffic everywhere, so I'd really like to get out of here."

Jerry moved in beside Scott as he gestured to the engineer. "You say my engineer here doesn't want to take your cargo?"

She nodded. "That's right. He's telling me if they're not listed on his manifest, you can't take them. That's stupid! You're going to Denver, you're chartered by NOAA, and I've got NOAA pallets headed to Denver, as well. The solution is simple."

Scott glanced up at Jerry. "What can we do, Jere?"

Jerry looked embarrassed as he sighed and shrugged. "Scott, the contract says we take only the listed cargo, and that has nothing to do with hers. The cargo we're here to get is the pallet they're about to load back there."

"To hell with the contract," McCoy interjected. "I'll take the responsibility as a NOAA officer and…"

Scott held his hand up in a wait gesture to Linda McCoy. "Doctor, you may not understand. These government air cargo contracts are monitored by incredibly rigid bureaucrats. We make one mistake, we'll lose the contract, and I'm not prepared to take that risk."

The scientist moved almost imperceptibly closer to Scott, her eyes boring into his.

"Have you considered, Captain, that the act of leaving my stuff behind might be that very mistake you're trying to avoid? I guarantee if you leave me behind, that rigid contract officer is going to hear all about it from a tired, infuriated senior member of the Boulder facility!"

Scott cocked his head and let himself frown at her. "Lady, threatening me isn't going to get your cargo on board." He saw her eyes flare as the words left his mouth.

"Who are you calling 'lady'?" she snapped, maneuvering even closer.

"I… was just trying to be polite to a lovely young woman. I consider 'lady' a compliment."

"The way you were using it is insulting."

Jerry was easing backward, trying to put some judicious distance between himself and the escalating exchange, as Scott stuffed his hands in his pockets, pursed his lips, and looked away for a few seconds before meeting her eyes again with a shrug.

"Look, Doctor, I'm sorry I offended you. I wasn't trying to be sexist. I just can't take your cargo without authorization."

She stood for a few seconds with her hands on her hips, glaring at him, then looked back at the small cargo office before locking her eyes on Scott again.

"So what are we going to do about this?"

Scott took a deep breath and checked his watch. They had little more than a half hour before departure time. "If you'll give me a few minutes, Doctor, I'll get on the phone with Washington and see what we can do."

"Okay. Meanwhile, tell your engineer to load my pallets aboard so we won't lose any time."

"Ah, Dr. McCoy," Scott began, as several potential retorts crossed his mind.

"You have a problem with that?" she asked in a combative tone.

Scott struggled with his natural instinct to counterattack and won. She was, after all, the client. It was counterproductive to make her even angrier.

He looked up and smiled at her, noticing how large her brown eyes seemed to be in anger.

"No. No problem. We'll get them loaded."

She nodded as Scott turned to Jerry to give the order.

The technician felt his blood run cold as he examined the graph for the third time.

There was no mistake.

The silent, probing beam of neutrons fired by his scanner was designed to trigger a tiny release of gamma rays if it came in contact with the type of nuclear material used to make bombs, and it had done precisely that. For several hours during the morning something within the boundaries of Miami International Airport had given back gamma rays with each sweep of the neutron beam.

Then, one hour ago—while he and his commander had been off munching tacos before the scheduled afternoon demonstration—the level of gamma rays had dropped to zero.

Oh my God, we blew it! he thought, dying inside. Some inspector—maybe military, maybe from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—had been assigned to waltz by with a suitcase full of shielded plutonium to test the machine he'd helped design, and he'd essentially been asleep at the switch. Obviously the demonstration came at the wrong time. They should have been monitoring during the morning hours as well.

In the distance his boss—a Navy commander—was proudly explaining the Navy's fast-response nuclear detection capabilities to three worried officials from the Federal Aviation Administration in charge of protecting the nation's airports against terrorists. A presidential directive to harden the nation's ports against nuclear terrorism had sparked a frenzy of activity and the flight of the gray portable trailer to Miami as the first working demonstrator.

"The moment even a capsule of fissionable material enters the boundaries of an airport like this, inside a terrorist's briefcase or otherwise," he was saying, "we'd see it."

Yeah, if we're watching, the technician thought to himself as he motioned his boss over to where the strip of graph paper lay like a poisonous snake on the table, serpentine evidence of their negligence at the worst possible moment.

The commander took the news with unexpected calm, then turned immediately to the FAA team with the strip in hand. "We weren't told we should be on-line this morning, but we did have the recorders going, and it looks like we caught your test anyway," he said with a forced smile, noting the puzzled expressions as each of the three men in turn examined the tracings.

The FAA's associate administrator for security spoke first, gesturing to the strip. "So we would see something like this if real bomb material reached an airport?"

The commander nodded. "You'd see exactly this. In fact, we did see exactly this." His finger traced the line where it reached its apex. "This was real bomb material spitting gamma rays at us, fellows, as I'm sure you know. By the way, who brought the stuff to Miami for you?"

An exchange of concerned expressions flickered among the three faces as the Navy commander continued, slightly insulted at their feigned act of innocence.

"Look, we're all cleared for Top Secret-Crypto here, and we're also well aware that the only thing that could spike a reading like this is the genuine article: some scary isotope of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. So I don't see the point in not telling me who was testing us."

There was still no response from the FAA men, and the commander felt his anger rising.

"Look, obviously up until about an hour ago, Miami International had enough plutonium around to build one helluva nuclear… bomb…" His voice trailed off as he realized something was very wrong. The senior FAA official was shaking his head, his face twisting in alarm as he grabbed the naval officer's forearm with his right hand, his left gesturing in the general direction of the passenger terminal, his voice taut with urgency.

"Commander, you're telling me these readings are real?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Because we didn't arrange a test! You understand what I'm saying? If there was fissionable material on this airport, we didn't bring it!"

Scott McKay, the captain of ScotAir Flight 50, glanced toward the cockpit door just as his flight engineer burst in with a deeply worried expression. Jerry Christian moved forward quickly without acknowledging the passenger in the observer's seat behind the captain and leaned toward McKay's ear.

"Problem?" the captain asked, already dreading the answer. Christian always looked sad, but seldom worried.

Jerry Christian gestured to the cargo compartment with his right thumb. A short, nervous stab. For twenty-five years the interior of their leased, aging Boeing 727 had carried passengers for various airlines. Now the converted passenger cabin carried cargo for them. There were three pallets loaded with scientific gear, two of them in the care of the senior atmospheric scientist sitting just behind the captain.

"What, Jerry?" Scott McKay prompted again.

"The number three pallet. I was doing a routine check. The numbers don't match our cargo manifest or the contract. In fact, nothing matches. Scott, I'm sorry, but I think we loaded the wrong pallet."

McKay looked stunned. "My God, that's our contract! That's high-priority cargo. You've got to be wrong!"

Christian could see a shadow of fear cross the young captain's face, replaced just as quickly by a familiar look of determination.

Doc Hazzard, the copilot, had been fiddling with the navigation radios in the right seat. Now he, too, looked up.

"Jerry, we checked all the numbers before loading," Hazzard said. "The numbers matched. Can't be the wrong one."

Jerry Christian shook his head slowly. At six-foot-six, he was too tall to stand upright in the Boeing cockpit. He leaned over the center console even farther and chewed on his lip before answering, his eyes fixing momentarily on the towering cumulus clouds a hundred miles ahead over the Louisiana coastline.

"The forklift driver must've gotten the wrong pallet after we inspected everything and signed the papers," Jerry said. "I parked him in front of the right pallet. I can't believe he lifted something else—but however it happened, it's happened. The number three pallet isn't ours. It's off by one digit on the manifest and the tag. I… guess I didn't check the numbers well enough once it was aboard. I'm sorry, Scott."

Scott McKay was already unlatching his safety belt as he looked over his right shoulder at the attractive woman in the observer's seat.

"Doctor, could you swing your legs out to the right, please? I need to move this seat back."

"You two aren't talking about my pallets, are you?" Dr. Linda McCoy asked. "I checked after loading. Those first two are definitely mine." She shot a worried look to her right at Jerry Christian, who was shaking his head as he backed toward the door of the cramped cockpit to give them room to maneuver around each other.

"No," Christian said, "it's the other one. The pallet at the rear. Not yours, Doctor."

McKay glanced at Doc Hazzard as he launched himself out of the left-hand seat. The beefy copilot, thirty-two years older than the captain, nodded.

"I'll monitor the radios, Scott." Hazzard pulled on his oxygen mask, the normal precaution when one pilot was out of the seat, as Christian and McKay headed for the cargo compartment.

The captain led the way, his mind racing through a maze of possibilities which all led to the same chilling conclusion: If the high-value, high-priority cargo pallet they were supposed to be hauling to Denver was still sitting on the ramp some seventy minutes behind them, his little upstart airline was in deep trouble, and the contract that was their lifeline would be in danger of cancellation.

The cargo pallets, each approximately eight feet square and piled high with equipment held together by heavy plastic and cargo nets, spanned the Boeing's cabin from fifteen feet aft of the cockpit door to some forty feet back. The remaining seventy feet of the cavernous interior was empty. A small, cramped passageway on the left side— between the pallets and the molded fiberglass sidewall of the old jetliner—permitted access to the back, and the two men squeezed into the passageway and moved rapidly toward the rear until they were standing next to the third pallet, oblivious to the sound of the slipstream passing on the other side of the aluminum fuselage at eighty percent of the speed of sound.

"One damn pallet, Jerry! That's all we had to do was haul one goddamn pallet from Florida to Colorado to collect our money so we could pay our bills. How in hell could we screw it up on the first trip?"

Jerry Christian shook his head in shared frustration, well aware of what was at stake. He pulled the shipper's information from a small plastic pocket on the side of the third pallet and handed it quickly to Scott.

Scott compared the numbers with a sinking feeling, knowing instinctively there would be no reprieve, no sudden discovery that everything was okay. Jerry Christian was too reliable to sound such an alarm prematurely. He was an amazingly good mechanic and flight engineer with a passion for precision, but his skills as a pilot were marginal, and the major airline he'd flown with for nine years had fired him when they couldn't get him through the mandatory checkout as copilot. Northwest may not have wanted Jerry Christian, but Scott McKay knew he'd been lucky to find him.

Scott handed the papers back, not wanting to meet Jerry's eyes. He knew how much this job meant to the lanky engineer who had answered his ad a year ago and become his friend as well as his employee. Rejected by the majors, Christian had been thrown to the nonscheduled world, a slightly seedy fraternity of underpaid mavericks and aging airplanes hauling unpredictable loads to unlikely places.

It was also, Scott reminded himself, a world of demanding clients—clients occasionally as nasty as government contract officers when someone failed to perform.

Scott looked away with a cold ball of apprehension suddenly gaining mass in the pit of his stomach, like the first time he'd missed a nighttime carrier landing as an F-14 pilot. The Eisenhower had been too far out at sea for him to fly anywhere else. He could land on the carrier and live, or punch out and probably die, so another approach was the only option. With adrenaline coursing through his body and his feet chattering on the rudder pedals, his sloppy, barely controlled second approach failed as well, leaving barely enough fuel for one last try.

He remembered yelling at himself that he had to remain in control. Navy fighter jocks were never supposed to be scared, but he was more than that—he was terrified. Somehow he had hung on and worked the problem, calming himself down and damping out his control inputs as the lights of the carrier loomed larger in his windscreen. At last the meatball—the visual landing system—had miraculously centered, and he felt his wheels hit the deck as his tailhook caught the number three wire.

Now, too, he was fighting to keep the situation under control and think. If the contract officer in Washington discovered their screw-up before he could smooth it over, the situation could easily spin out of control. He tried not to think of what hung in the balance. The contract, the money, the one chance they had to stay in business, all of it suddenly endangered.

Scott waved the cargo papers in the direction of the cockpit. "We'd better get the agent on the Flitephone. We're probably going to have to go back."

Christian's hand reached out to stop his employer.

"Uh, Scott. Dr. McCoy isn't going to be happy about this. Her cargo is high-priority, too."

"She's not the prime customer," Scott snapped, regretting his tone. "We only took her stuff because she was such a pain in the butt back there, and she was right, the contract did allow additions."

There was a moment of awkward silence between them before Jerry spoke.

"You're always a sucker for pretty females," he offered, hoping to trigger a smile.

There was none. Scott's distraction was total. The perception that the previous year of struggle had been nothing but a house of cards now in collapse filled his mind. Why had he ever had the stupid idea he could start an airline, for God's sake? All his inheritance was about to go down the drain, and he might be powerless to stop it.

Scott looked up suddenly. "What?"

"Nothing," Jerry replied quickly. "I just wanted to, ah, point out, you know, that going back isn't going to sit well with the doctor."

Scott nodded curtly and turned, surprised to see Linda McCoy herself standing at the forward part of the narrow walkway between the left side of the 727's cabin wall and the two cargo pallets that she'd been so desperate to get aboard. She couldn't have heard him over the noise of the slipstream, Scott concluded, but he felt embarrassed nonetheless—especially so as he turned sideways to squeeze past her, a maneuver which put their bodies in contact long enough for Scott to be acutely aware of how well endowed she was. Normally he would have been amused and secretly pleased. Now all he could think of was the missing cargo, and the impending consequences.

"Sorry, Doctor," he explained, diverting his eyes from hers, "I've got to get to the phone."

"Anything I can help with?" McCoy asked, molding herself to the sidewall to keep the encounter from being any more intimate than it already was.

Scott shook his head and moved rapidly toward the flight deck door as Jerry Christian appeared from behind, his tall frame hunched over, his eyes following the captain's rapid return to the cockpit, knowing his friend was sick with worry.

Linda McCoy stayed next to her cargo pallets, blocking the way. She turned to the flight engineer and met his eyes for a few seconds, trying to read the depth of his distress.

"How big a problem is this?" she asked.

Jerry hesitated, unsure how much to say. She'd been iron-willed and assertive in forcing her way on board, and it had taken a half hour to locate the contracting officer by phone in Washington for approval. Dr. McCoy, he'd told Scott, was absolutely right.

"The contract clearly permits NOAA additions to the cargo load," he'd said. "Read the damn contract. Professionals do."

Scott had been deeply embarrassed. Jerry noticed that same steely-eyed look now in Linda McCoy's eyes and had to fight the urge to glance away.

"Well…" he began.

She looked toward the cockpit. "I haven't heard of your company. Is he the owner?"

Jerry nodded, noting her gaze had snapped back to him, her expression unreadable.

"Kind of young, isn't he?"

Jerry shrugged. "Scott is thirty-one, but he's an ex-Navy carrier pilot, a lieutenant commander. He flew Tomcats. He's a great pilot."

"How many airplanes do you have?"

"Uh, this is the only one. It's leased. We're real small."

She nodded. "Obviously, which is why he was so concerned about carrying my pallets."

"He didn't want to take a chance with this contract. It's… really important to us."

Jerry Christian felt very awkward all of a sudden. He ran his right hand through the unruly mop which passed for hair and glanced at one of her cargo pallets.

"What kind of research do you do, Doctor?"

She steadied herself against the sidewall of the cabin and studied him without responding, her right hand absently working the zipper of a breast pocket on her jumpsuit back and forth.

Jerry tried again. "I mean, I heard you say something about Antarctica."

Again she glanced forward, then turned back to Jerry and drilled her gaze into the engineer's eyes once more.

"He's not thinking of going back, is he?" she asked.

"Well…" Jerry began, wondering how she'd figured it out so fast.

"I realize you fellows are worried about leaving that other cargo, but you can't go back before you drop me in Denver. I've got time-critical, battery-powered equipment ticking away in these pallets."

Jerry shrugged. "I'm not the captain. That's… I mean, I don't make those decisions."

She nodded and smiled thinly. "Okay, then once more we'd better go talk to the man who does."