Medusa's Child

FIVE

Vivian Henry paused as she entered the Tallahassee terminal, wondering if someone—such as a representative for Universal Air Freight Forwarders— might have the decency to be waiting to escort her to the freight dock.

No one, however, seemed interested in her presence.

She'd hardly noticed the flight from Miami. There was too much else to think about, including Universal's outrageous negligence. The whole episode had rattled her badly, since losing that pallet had seemed like a final personal insult—especially when they told her a government agency was behind the whole mixup.

So they'd done it to her again. She'd reached that conclusion for a moment back in Miami, emotion overwhelming logic. An internal rage from the two-year battle over her annuity had engulfed her—until she discovered the agency was NOAA, and that they, too, had been victimized by Universal's mistake.

Vivian walked quickly through the security checkpoint toward the exit doors, ignoring a man in an expensive suit who courteously held a door for her.

She pushed open the adjacent door herself.

The man hesitated, shrugged slightly, and studied her as she passed—a tall, elegant woman with a shoulder-length mane of chestnut hair pulled back around her ears and allowed to fall. The well-cut dark blue suit and heels she wore emphasized her slender feminine shape and patrician bearing. She was probably forty-nine or fifty, he concluded, smiling as he held the visual memory of her in his mind—unaware he had just underestimated her age by more than a decade.

Vivian spotted the taxi queue and moved toward it. She'd begun to take pride in her appearance again in recent months, and she knew she often attracted male attention. Yet, for some reason, her need for anonymity on this trip was visceral, and she felt a small shiver of relief when the man at the door moved away without speaking. She was ashamed of having to come crawling back once again to do Rogers' bidding, ashamed that she had no choice but to perform for the money.

The fact that the air freight terminal was within a mile angered the cabbie, who had "waited in line a long time," he'd snarled, "for a better fare than this." He slapped on his meter in a gesture of disgust and burned out of the baggage claim area into a light rainstorm, muttering in what sounded like Farsi.

Strange, she thought. I hadn't noticed from the airplane that it was raining.

Vivian forced herself to think through the next few hours. Even if the aircraft was waiting as promised, she would likely face more problems on arrival in Washington. She'd called from Miami to reschedule the flatbed truck, but she wasn't convinced they were going to show up as promised, and even her contact at the Pentagon had sounded put-upon. He couldn't understand why she kept insisting the crate be delivered directly to the officer in charge of the Pentagon's basement storerooms, rather than shipped to a nearby Air Force base or some other large storage facility.

"In the interest of national security," she'd told him, following Rogers' script precisely.

"Well," he had said, "I can't meet you later than 6 p.m. I'll stay that long, but that's it."

They haven't a clue as to what I'm bringing them, she thought. No one ever thought he'd succeed.

Of course, there was always the chance he hadn't succeeded, and the Medusa Weapon was nothing more than one last gesture of contempt by Rogers Henry—a useless mockup sent as a last insult to the men who'd exiled him into early retirement. They could study it for months, maybe years, before discovering it was a hoax, and Rogers was very capable of hatching such a plan. She couldn't be sure, of course, but the idea that he could have actually developed the Medusa Weapon by himself still sounded ludicrous. They would have no choice but to spend months and many millions of dollars inspecting the mockup, and perhaps even building a real one and testing it at astronomical expense in some remote corner of the globe.

The cabbie wrestled his vehicle into another high-speed turn, skidding on the wet pavement, delighted that he'd thrown his passenger to one side of the backseat. He tromped heavily on the gas pedal to make sure she didn't miss the point, then rocketed down a service road toward the freight facility as he stole a look at her in the rearview mirror—disappointed that she seemed lost in thought and oblivious to the wild ride.

Vivian cringed at the thought of how Rogers would have reacted to the cabbie's conduct. He would have picked a verbal fight, drowning the cabbie in a tidal wave of rhetorical insults the man would have had no hope of understanding.

She didn't miss such scenes. Her former husband had been capable of hurling intimidating, withering verbal abuse at anyone, including his wife.

Especially at me, she thought. She certainly had the psychological scars to prove it.

It startled her to remember that Rogers had been dead and buried for two years. But in some strange psychological twist of the mind, she found herself regarding the palletized crate as his coffin. With its delivery to the military brass, she could, hopefully, be rid of him at last.

Vivian realized the cab had stopped and the driver was holding the door for her with no courtesy intended.

"Six-fifty," he said curtly in his heavily accented voice, obviously anxious to get back to the terminal for a more substantial fare.

Without comment she placed the exact amount of six dollars and fifty cents into the man's hand in her own gesture of contempt and walked toward the entrance of the metal building, shielding her head with her hand against the rain. She barely heard the cab door slamming behind her and its screeching departure from the parking lot.

ScotAir's Boeing 727 was waiting as promised, the three-engine jetliner sitting sideways to the freight facility as a fueler disconnected his hose from beneath the right wing.

A sandy-haired young man with the four-stripe epaulets of a captain had been pacing around the front office. He was of medium build and broad shoulders, athletic, with a wide mouth and easy smile set in a handsome face. She had the feeling she'd seen him before, but the whisper of recognition was vague and distant.

The young captain brightened as she entered. Before noticing the lines around his eyes, she judged him to be in his mid-twenties—which seemed young for a captain.

No, she decided, mid-thirties—and young enough to be my son.

He moved rapidly toward her with an outstretched hand. "Mrs. Henry?"

"Yes."

He shook her hand firmly and looked at his watch simultaneously. "I'm terribly sorry about the cargo mixup," he began. "Just for the record, I truly don't think it was our fault, but however it happened, if we're going to get you to Washington, we'd better get going. I assume you know there's a huge hurricane threatening D.C. and we only have a limited window."

"And you are?" she asked, a bit put off by his rapid speech and lack of introduction.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I'm Scott McKay, the… captain." For a second he'd intended to add the word "owner," but he was speaking to someone who'd threatened to sue him, and by next Monday the title of owner would apply only to the empty shell of what used to be his airline. No, it was better to let her think of him as a mere employee.

"Any luggage?" Scott asked.

"Just this overnight bag," she replied, holding up a small tote bag. "You mentioned that hurricane, Captain. How much time do we have?"

Scott bit his lip as he glanced at a sheaf of papers covered with numbers.

"Well, I'd say if we're off the ground in the next twelve minutes, that puts us into National Airport about an hour and forty minutes later. I figure it'll take us forty-five minutes to get your pallet off, get you on your way, get us refueled, and get back in the air. That's a bit under two and a half hours, and the winds are forecast to be blowing around thirty knots in D.C. within the next two hours, if the storm doesn't speed up. So we're time-critical."

He gestured to the door and she moved in that direction, ducking her head under the proffered umbrella when they were outside.

"I've heard this hurricane is unusual," she said. Noise from another jet sitting fifty yards away with its engines running began to overwhelm their voices.

"I'VE NEVER SEEN ONE THIS HUGE!" Scott shouted at her.

She nodded, and he continued.

"IT'S CALLED HURRICANE SIGRID, AND IT'S OVER EIGHT HUNDRED MILES IN DIAMETER! WINDS NEAR THE CENTER ARE…"

"WHAT?" she yelled.

"WINDS ARE ABOVE TWO HUNDRED NEAR THE CENTER!" Scott handed her the umbrella and motioned her up the slick, rather unstable boarding ladder which had been placed at the forward entry door, waiting until she was at the top before bounding up behind her.

Safely inside, Vivian Henry asked him to repeat the answer.

"I was saying," Scott began, "that the winds are horrendous near the center, above two hundred knots. If that eye hits the Delaware coast, it'll blow away Rehoboth Beach and half the Jersey seashore to the north."

"But can we make it to D.C. in time?" Her eyes were wide with alarm. They were racing both the clock and a killer hurricane.

Scott took a deep breath as he saw her expression. "I can't promise we can, ma'am, but we're certainly going to try."

"Please…" she began, then hesitated, as if recomposing her words. "I… would rather not go into details, but please understand that it is of the utmost importance that I reach Washington this afternoon with my shipment."

How can I tell him how much I want this to be over? she thought.

Scott McKay could feel the urgency in her words, and her anxiety was unsettling, distracting him enough to leave his answer sounding less than confident.

"We'll… do the best we can, Mrs. Henry."

At noon the federal government in Washington began shutting down in the face of Hurricane Sigrid. The emergency closure, however, was having no effect whatsoever on the rapidly escalating workload of the National Security Council staff.

Stanley Shapiro, the President's National Security Advisor, decided to walk over from the West Wing to the NSC's main offices in the adjacent Executive Office Building as soon as it became apparent a genuine terrorist threat might have been detected in Florida. With the President on his way to Japan for an international trade summit, the situation was being relayed to Air Force One. The White House Chief of Staff snagged Dr. Shapiro for a hallway briefing as he was leaving his West Wing office.

"Right now, it's a mess," Shapiro began. "You've been briefed on what that Navy monitoring outfit in Miami thinks they detected, right?"

The Chief of Staff nodded.

"Okay, while Langley is working on targeting the who, FBI is working with the Pentagon and the FAA to find out the where, and NRC is working on what material was detected, but the bottom line is, we may already be too late. We may have already lost the trail."

"I was told all the airplanes were being called back to Miami."

The former Princeton professor shook his head no, causing his trademark bow tie to wobble, an image the tightly buttoned-down Chief of Staff had always found irritating. "They didn't discover it in time. Some planes had already landed at their destination, others had to refuel first, and thus could have had the material removed. Eight flights, I think, were returned and taxied past that detector with no results. But the radioactive package could have been in a truck or a car as well, and we're not even sure we've accounted for every aircraft yet. It's a needle in a haystack."

The Chief of Staff leaned against the wall and studied the floor for a few seconds before looking up. "Anyone considered putting that detector on a plane and flying it around the country?"

"I'm told it won't work in the air without special equipment no one has time to manufacture. I'm also told an airborne version had been canceled in some Pentagon budget revision several years back, and so far we don't have a detector in orbit."

"Naturally the Pentagon would take advantage of the moment to get in those digs. So where are we?" the Chief of Staff asked. "What do we do?"

The National Security Advisor shook his head and pursed his lips before replying. "I don't think anyone knows what to do. It's terrifying. We've got everyone up to and including Justice involved. There's not a lot of bickering, but there's not a lot of coordination, either. Everyone's absolutely astounded that our worst-case threat may actually be happening, and if so, it's a real nightmare, because I'm told those readings were strong enough to confirm one thing for certain: Someone out there has enough unregistered illegal weapons-grade material to build a thermonuclear bomb. We have to assume they also have the hardware and the expertise to build a device to use it."

The Chief of Staff snorted. "Hell, even Tom Clancy told everyone how to do it several books ago, not that I read his stuff."

"Bottom line? We have to assume someone out there is planning to detonate a nuke somewhere in the United States. CIA says they'll support that conclusion."

"Good God!" He whistled, low and long. "How much power are we looking at?"

The National Security Advisor shrugged. "God only knows. I'm told anything from a kiloton to megatons. Enough to wipe out any one of our cities. There's no precedent for this. Well"—he hesitated—"there is, sort of. You're aware of the Iranian the FBI snagged in Dallas in the mid-eighties with a briefcase full of radiation?"

The Chief of Staff nodded. "Yes. At least the fact that they had enough fissile material, as it's called, to construct a bomb, and the fact that they had a workable trigger. We never knew the target." He sighed and shook his head sadly. "I remember warning that it was just a matter of time before this happened. I gave a speech many years ago —even before the Dallas incident, while I was still in the Senate—about nuclear proliferation leading inevitably to an American city being destroyed by a nuclear fireball to further some maniac's cause. It was a dire warning, carefully designed to shake up the audience and make them angry enough to pressure some of my colleagues who were trying to cut back the FBI's funding. But you know what, Stanley?"

Shapiro raised his eyebrows in response.

"The truth is, I didn't believe it myself! I didn't really believe that we'd ever face that possibility."

Another car squealed to a halt outside the Navy trailer. The FBI agent behind the wheel spoke a few more words into his cellular phone and punched the disconnect button. He leaped from his car and bounded through the door of the trailer.

"Okay, people, we've inspected every aircraft we can inspect, I'm afraid," he announced. "There's no one left to intercept, and we're batting zero. Any creative ideas will be appreciated."

One of the men inside had turned around. "They got the Salt Lake flight, too?"

The agent nodded. "On arrival. They found nothing, provided our people were looking for the right things."

The Navy officer who had originally commanded the trailer was sitting at a small desk to one side. He turned toward the senior agent now and nodded a brief greeting before turning back to the papers spread out before him. He was obviously searching for something, the senior FBI agent realized, and he was apparently frustrated at not finding it.

The senior agent moved quietly to the Navy officer's side and took a quick look at the documents he was studying. On the top of the stack was the rapidly prepared list of flights that had taken off from Miami International about the time the gamma ray readings dropped to zero. And sitting next to them were a stack of cargo manifests from the various freight forwarders on the field showing everything that had been shipped as cargo during the same time period.

"Something puzzling you there, Commander?" the agent asked.

The naval officer looked up, scratched his cheek, and frowned slightly, then pointed to the manifests.

"Something doesn't fit." He got to his feet and picked up the papers, pointing to the top sheet as he brought them closer for the senior agent to see.

"There was a shipment of high-priority pallets for NOAA which was to have gone out to the Denver area on a 727, but apparently an Air Force cargo jet, a C-141, landed here and took that load for NOAA, according to the notes from whoever talked to the forwarder. I know you intercepted that flight."

The FBI agent nodded. "We had him land at Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base near Kansas City. We found nothing, of course. Just that one pallet belonging to NOAA. The Air Force crew confirmed they were pressed into service when a contract flight failed to show. They weren't happy."

The commander was nodding again, almost rhythmically, as he sat down and pulled more papers toward him. "Right. Right."

The agent pulled up a folding chair and straddled it backward. "So what's bothering you?" he asked.

The commander looked at him before speaking. "I… may be wrong, here, sir, but I think there's yet another cargo departure that isn't listed on the tower log."

"That shouldn't be possible," the FBI agent replied, following the commander's index finger.

"I agree, but the freight forwarder also lists a second NOAA shipment in his inventory as of this morning. Instead of the one pallet which left with the C-141, however, this one is a two-pallet combination, also bound for Colorado. Now, we know where the single pallet went. It left with the Air Force. But suddenly that mysterious second set of two pallets disappears from the list. So where'd the other pallets go, or were there ever really two shipments to begin with? For that matter, if there was a second shipment, was it really a pair of NOAA pallets or someone taking advantage of NOAA's presence to ship something else under an alias?"

The agent rose to his feet and leaned over to look at the papers more closely as the commander continued.

"See the tower log here? There appears to be a double entry for Northwest Nine-Ninety-Four. See how one is crossed-out, as if the tower controller realized he'd accidentally put the same flight down twice? That time corresponds almost perfectly with our reading drop. Now, suppose that crossed-out entry was really some other cargo flight carrying those two mystery pallets out of here, and the controller simply made an error with the call sign? They're human, too. They do make errors, and obviously someone wrote down the same flight twice."

The senior FBI agent turned immediately to an FAA inspector a few feet away.

"Charlie, could you find out if there was a flight plan out of Miami filed about this time for a cargo flight whose call sign doesn't show up on the departure log?"

The FAA man nodded yes. "Miami Center's computer should have a ready record of all the flight plans that were activated. It'll take a few minutes to get and compare. If that fails, we could always pull the tower tapes and listen."

The FBI agent pointed to the papers on the table. "Call the center, please. If there was a departure the tower didn't log, we need to know what airplane it was, and where it is right now."

The commander rose to his feet again beside the senior agent. "You know," he began, "two pallets of cargo could, rather easily…"

"Contain a package of plutonium?" the agent finished. "Commander, even a briefcase is big enough."

In less than five minutes the FAA inspector hung up the telephone and swiveled around to catch the senior FBI agent's eye.

"You were right!"

The Navy commander rose from his seat. "You found something?"

"One flight did slip by us. A Boeing 727 belonging to a tiny cargo outfit out of Colorado Springs. ScotAir. He left at exactly the time that Northwest flight was entered twice."

The FBI agent turned rapidly to an assistant. "Call the forwarder who handled the NOAA stuff and find out if they put anything on that 727." He turned back to the FAA inspector. "Do we know where he was going?"

"Yep. He was flight-planned to Denver, Colorado."

"Bingo!" was the reply.