Storm Killer

by Benjamin Blue

  “REAL TIME REQUIRES PLAN DATA REFRESH … 4:55 MINUTES REMAINING

  After what seemed an eternity but was only eight seconds, the monitor displayed a much wished for series of messages.

  “REAL TIME READY FOR PLAN DATA.”

  “PLAN DATA SESSION ESTABLISHED.”

  “PLAN DATA TRANSMISSION RESUMED.”

  “CONTROL SYSTEM REFRESHING REAL TIME CACHE”

  “STATION BEING REPOSITIONED TO CURRENT PLAN DATA”

  “OPERATIONS NORMAL”

  Everyone began applauding at the same time; the station was now under control.

  Kim had not noticed that Lt. James had slipped his hand into hers as they had waited to see if station control would return. She did not try to pull her hand away, but instead gave his hand a slight squeeze.

  “We made it!” she said brightly to the lieutenant.

  He smiled and nodded, “Yes, we did. And now we can sort out how our prisoners and Rafael orchestrated this with Dr. Rosen. Let’s leave these scientist types to their fun and games with the hurricane while we wrap up our job.”

  Layne overheard their conversation. He stopped them as they started to walk out hand in hand. “Excuse me, but did I hear you use the name of Dr. Rosen?” he asked.

  “Yes. We have reason to believe he’s behind this whole plot,” Kim answered.

  “I knew him. He’s an egotistical ass. I never liked him, and I don’t think he like me very much,” Layne stated.

  “I think Brad thought the world of him. Rosen called Brad one of his best students. I think Greg was also one of Rosen’s teacher’s pets. You’ll have to ask him.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Layne. We plan to ask him lots of questions!” Kim laughed. Then, the lieutenant joined her with a hearty baritone laugh. Layne just stared at them, not knowing that Greg and Brad were in custody for their roles in the Storm Killer plot.

  Kim put her arm around the small of the lieutenant’s back and he put his arm lightly around her shoulder avoiding putting pressure anywhere near her bullet wound. They looked at each other, laughed again and walked out of the control center.

  85

  Into The Frying Pan, Out Of The Fire

  Storm Killer’s cone of heat was only three kilometers from the Lincoln. But even at that distance the effects of the tremendous heat were becoming apparent. The sea boiled and huge clouds of steam were rising even around the Lincoln.

  The four and a half acres of wood flight desk was starting to smoke. Soon, it would burst into flame as the heat continued to rise.

  The paint on the side of the ship nearest the heat had started to blister and slough off into the bubbling seawater.

  The glass in the bridge windows closest to the heat ray cracked from the tremendous and instantaneous temperature differential.

  The crew in the refrigerated coolers were already experiencing temperatures approaching one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Even this far down in the ship in these chilled storage rooms, the temperature would soon rise to over a thousand degrees or higher as the actual heat ray swept over the ship.

  All care had been taken to remove the chance of an accidental explosion caused by volatile materials normally carried by an aircraft carrier.

  All of the Lincoln aircraft had been drained of fuel to avoid any chance of an explosion.

  The aviation fuel stores would boil, but experts had told the Admiral that the fuel would not ignite. They did recommend the Lincoln’s crew add some additional external venting to the fuel tanks to allow gas fumes to evaporate to reduce the possibility of any possible fire source. As such, two large pipes had been added the tank vents that ran up the conning tower all the way to the radar antenna base and then right angled away from the ship for eight meters. Any fuel would burn away from these pipes even if a fire started.

  The aircraft and ship’s ordinance normally stored in the forward and rear magazines had been jettisoned overboard and were probably already lying on the bottom of the sea some two miles down.

  The Lincoln operated on nuclear power generation. The reactor was scrammed ten minutes before the last officer had left the bridge. Scramming the reactor partially shuts down the reactor while leaving it ready to quickly restart. This restart capability is extremely important in a warship. If they survived, or more likely when a recovery crew arrived after their deaths, the reactor could be restarted and the ship taken back to Hampton Roads under its own power.

  The Admiral sat on a sack of potatoes and wondered if he would look like some kind of roast beef dinner with roasted potatoes after the heat ray passed over. Stress brings out some macabre ideas. It’s almost over. I think it will be quick. At least I hope it will be.

  If the Admiral had been on deck at that moment, he would have seen a welcome sight. The cone of heat suddenly began racing back to the east. Storm Killer was repositioning her killer beam on the hurricane’s eye wall as originally planned.

  Within five minutes, the heat ray receded to over one hundred miles away.

  The Abraham Lincoln was saved by less than half a kilometer in distance, and in less than thirty seconds.

  86

  Henri

  The wind gusts were down to less than one hundred kilometers an hour. The sea had begun receding from the Puerto Plata downtown area.

  As the water level dropped, destruction beyond belief was being exposed. Not one human habitation within the city below the third floor had been spared. All store fronts and shops were empty shells. The goods that used to be proudly displayed in these businesses were now just so much junk scattered as far as fifteen kilometers inland or laying on the ocean floor.

  Henri slowly regained consciousness. He was lying in the upper fronds of a palm tree about five kilometers inland from the city center.

  He tried to move and gasped as intense pain shot through his back and legs. He looked down at his feet and saw that both were pointed in impossible, grotesque positions. His left foot was pointed directly toward his back. His right foot was dangling straight down at a right angle from his right leg. The pain from the obviously broken legs and feet was excruciating. Tears formed as he attempted to move to the edge to see below him. The tears came from both the physical pain throbbing through his broken body and well as the emotional pain of having witnessed the deaths of his family as the storm surge swept away their home.

  He remembered falling from the disintegrating building as the surge hit. He vaguely remembered hitting the water and going deep below the surface. He had struggled with all his might to swim back to the surface. With the last dregs of air slipping from his burning lungs, he had broken the surface. He’d treaded water long enough to grab a wooden door that floated past him. Heaving himself up on the door, he collapsed and gasped for air.

  The wind-driven rain stung like a millions bee stings. The surge was quickly carrying him inland on his makeshift raft.

  He had seen the surge cover the floor where his mother’s apartment had been located. He knew that his mother and siblings would have been clutching each other as the seawater poured into their home.

  Henri moaned as he thought of the panic and fear that his family must have felt as the water smothered the life from their bodies.

  He knew that if he recovered from this disaster, he would dedicate his life to revenging his family’s death. Someone would pay. The only question was who that would be.

  He slipped back into a troubled sleep and was found by a local farmer returning home on the following day. The farmer took the boy in and the farmer’s family tended Henri until his injuries healed.

  Henri thanked the family for their aid and went in search of what had happened to his own family. He became another refugee living in a large tent city on the outskirts of what had been Puerto Plata.

  He found records indicating his mother’s body had been found two days after the storm passed. She had been clutching one of his younger brothers’ bodies tightly to her bosom. There was no indication of which brother it had be
en. The army had cremated the two.

  Of his other sibling, no trace was ever found.

  Henri cried every day as he returned from his searches for his family members.

  He was alone.

  87

  Killing Edna

  Storm Killer resumed its intended mission as Edna skirted the north shore of the Dominican Republic. Its eye was ninety kilometers off the coast, but the winds whipping the island beaches were measured at over four hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. Rain was falling at the rate of ten centimeters an hour.

  The city of San Felipe de Puerto Plata, often referred to as simply Puerto Plata, was home to over one hundred and thirty thousand souls. Edna hit at high tide, and the sea, pushed by Edna’s tremendous winds, cause that city to be hit by a thirteen-meter storm surge.

  The entire city had been inundated with seawater up to the third floor of its highest buildings. Deaths were being estimated at over one hundred thousand from just this one urban center.

  Edna was a true monster and it remained pointed directly at Florida.

  Over the next thirty-six hours, Storm Killer lived up to its name. By proper application of its heat ray to the exact points in the storm, Edna began losing her punch. Just as the designers had reasoned, the weather engine of the storm was short-circuiting. Edna dropped from being the largest and strongest category-five hurricane ever recorded to a modest, but still dangerous, category three storm.

  The weakened Edna lashed Florida, The Miami area sustained damage commiserate with the storm’s strength. Five people died and property damage was about one billion dollars.

  But Storm Killer had proved it could weaken hurricanes. It had attacked the world’s strongest hurricane ever recorded and significantly weakened it. True, it had caused the record-strength storm, but it was not the technology’s fault. It was the fault of a group of treasonous individuals. Once the technology was applied as designed, it reversed the effects to a manageable level within a day.

  The tropical weather of the world would never again be outside man’s ability to form and shape.

  88

  Wrap Up

  Two months after Edna the investigations were wrapped up. After multiple interrogations of the prisoners and a tremendous coordinated fact-finding effort by the Storm Killer security team, the FBI, the Secret Service, NASA Security, and the CIA, the story seemed clear. Kim and Lt. James were finally allowed to write their final report.

  Rose Magruder laid the report on the President’s desk and simply said, “The final report’s here.” She left the room as the President picked up the “Eyes Only” binder and began reading.

  According to the report, Dr. Rosen approached his two most brilliant and beloved students with an offer of twenty-five million dollars for each if they assisted him in discrediting the Storm Killer project. Dr. Rosen played on their greed, their mutual interest in lowering man’s impact of the natural earth processes and reduced global warming, and their idolization of Dr. Rosen as their mentor to get them to join in his plot.

  Brad Bolino brought Rafael Denuza into the plot as his paid soldier. He did so anonymously so Rafael could not identify him. Rafael knew him only as “The Boss”. Rafael’s family had needed money for his mother’s cancer surgery. An added bonus was Rafael’s avid, almost obsessive, interest in the “green” state of the Earth.

  Rafael brought his stepsister, Dr. Francine Cruz, into the plot. She assisted him because Rafael was her half-brother and family was of utmost importance to her. Bolino used Francine as a casual sex partner to keep tabs on her and to learn what her brother may have told her about the plot.

  Bolino needed to appear to be ill to the point of being confined to his quarters at the times he was out executing portions of the plan Dr. Rosen had devised. He had a very bad allergy to oranges, but withheld that information when compiling his medical history for this mission. He managed to obtain an orange and scraped off the zest. By eating a little of the zest over a three-day period, he exhibited all the symptoms of a bad cold.

  Francine, who, by now, had developed some feelings for Bolino because of their sexual trysts, believed his complaint of a cold and treated him without performing a routine examination on him.

  Bolino admitted he had ordered Rafael to draw Kim Danby to the safety closet. The investigation was going too smoothly for the three conspirators’ tastes. After discussing the situation with Dr. Rosen and getting his agreement, Greg Ballard told Bolino to go ahead with his plan and have Rafael capture Kim. Their intention was to slow the investigation as much as possible and hopefully divert the team’s attention in a different direction.

  Right after being arrested, Bolino tried to push the murder of Rafael onto Greg, but Kim had quickly ended that charade by asking to see the bottoms of the shoes each of them were wearing. When Brad raised his right foot, the missing ribs of his shoe sole matched perfectly to the pictures Kim snapped with her cell phone at the murder site.

  Greg was the primary contact man with Dr. Rosen. He, in turn, passed all instructions to Bolino. He instructed Bolino to do whatever needed to be done to ensure success of the plot. This, Bolino interpreted as permission to eliminate Rafael.

  The plotters thought that the station’s senior staff would automatically put the station in ‘standby mode’ when the first actions of sabotage occurred. But they were surprised that the station continued normal operation.

  The report went on to provide details of how Bolino pushed for Kim to be assigned over Lt. James to run the investigation. He knew of her drug habit and thought she would be the weaker leader. He hoped that her assignment would cause friction and jealousy within the investigation team. He didn’t realize that Lt. James and Kim had developed strong feelings for each other, or that those feelings continued to increase as the investigation proceeded.

  Ballard, at the first act of sabotage, took a few minutes from the airlock repair to go to Core City and wire the explosives to bring down the crystal lab. The lab’s crashing was intended as a simple diversion to take the attention off the true plot to discredit and disable the station.

  Bolino sabotaged the reflective film array so that the technicians responsible for doing so could not turn off the heat ray.

  Kim finally figured out how Hoch’s death had been staged when she received a couple of fresh pieces of evidence.

  After the crisis was over, the report outlined, Hoch’s body had been shipped to Earth for an autopsy to be performed by The L.E. McHenry Medical Examiner Facility, in Brevard County. Cape Canaveral, where the shuttle carrying the body landed, is in Brevard County, giving that ME office jurisdiction of the body. The autopsy found two burn marks on Hoch’s side. These burn marks were consistent with a TASER burn according to the ME.

  Kim found the TASER among Bolino’s belongings in his quarters. This was dusted for prints and his fingerprints were found all over the tool. Further, the TASER electrodes exactly fit the burn marks on Hoch’s body. DNA tests on two small pieces of charred flesh caught in the TASER prongs had conclusively proved it was the weapon used to disable Hoch.

  Kim reasoned that Bolino set himself up as the hostage. When Hoch arrived, she theorized, Bolino must have been lying on the floor. Hoch probably bent down to check his vitals and Bolino hit him in the side with a TASER he’d hidden under the edge of the bed. Once disabled, it had been easy for Bolino to take Hoch’s weapon and shoot him with it.

  Bolino then reported Hoch’s shooting and attacked Kim when the lieutenant went to get the Doctor. Bolino played things well enough to convince Kim and the Lieutenant of his version of the murder and that they should entrust him with returning the chip to Layne Bartlett.

  The report went on to discuss Dr. Rosen’s deception of both Bolino and Ballard when he decided they were expendable and ensure the station was destroyed with the crew on board. They were near panicked in trying to get off the station before the missile struck.

  The investigation uncovered that a senior senator of the M
exican Federal government orchestrated and financed the whole operation. He was being held in a Mexican federal prison, awaiting the wheels of justice. The United States asked for extradition but Mexico also wanted a portion of his hide. The Dominican Republic authorities also declared that they wanted to try him for crimes against humanity in the death of over three hundred thousand of their citizens. There might be enough of him to go around if he lived long enough.

  The same band of countries was searching for Dr. Rosen. His elaborate deception in travel left the combined investigative bodies of six nations desperately searching for him. His trail had gone cold in Lima, Peru.

  No one remembered seeing him even though the immigration forms indicated he had arrived in country. They checked various local hotels and found one showing that he had checked in and left the next day. No one on the hotel’s day shift remembered seeing him. The night shift clerk who checked him in died in a car accident one week after the incident.

  The hotel had no security cameras so there was no visual record of the guests’ coming and going. He just seemed to vanish into thin air at that point.

  The thought among the various investigative agencies was that he chose that particular hotel because of its lack of cameras and the fact that the night shift and day shift switched at three AM. This meant no one from the night shift would be around when he left.

  The trail had grown cold by the time the report was written and assembled but there was always the possibility that he would be found.

  89

  Rose And The President

  After the Storm Killer incident, the press had a field day with the President’s involvement in the events. But the public had seen the results when Storm Killer had fulfilled its mission. They forgave and forgot.