The Permit

by William B. Scott

  He tossed a glance over his shoulder. A faint glow from the rear cockpit reflected off the bubble canopy. Pence was hunched over, tweaking a mind-numbing array of controls.

  "How's T-Rex feeling tonight?" Byrne asked, words distorted by an oxygen mask covering his nose and mouth.

  "Rex is happy. Rearin' to fry bad-guy 'tronics," Pence clipped, distracted.

  Byrne smiled. "Fry" was an understatement. Ground tests in a huge anechoic chamber at Groom Lake—which he and a long line of Lawhead Corporation pilots called "The Ranch"—had demonstrated the awesome, near-magical power of the T-Rex system to destroy electronic circuitry.

  In essence, T-Rex's designers had harnessed unique characteristics of a nether region—the terahertz frequency band of the electromagnetic spectrum, a "gray zone" between radio waves and infrared light. Strange phenomena occurred in that weird border region. Creative "black world" engineers had capitalized on them, developing a futuristic weapon that generated extremely powerful terahertz-frequency radiation. When precisely focused on electrically powered targets, the results were spectacular.

  T-Rex traced its heritage to a device first tested aboard a Republic F-105G "Wild Weasel" fighter in the 1960s. Although rudimentary and of limited power, the F-105G's electromagnetic-pulse system managed to snuff out every incandescent light along a section of the Florida coast. Subsequent tests led to T-Rex's electromagnetic grandfather being fielded on classified Douglas EB-66 "Destroyer" aircraft, during the Vietnam War.

  Byrne and Pence had further demonstrated T-Rex's formidable capabilities on covert operational missions. Flown over the Hindu Kush mountains, T-Rex had silenced Taliban and al Qaeda satellite phones, laptop computers and God-knows-how-many GPS navigation devices. In one night, a hell of a lot of cave-dwelling terrorists on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border had been relegated back to the Stone Age of communications.

  And with nary a fatality. Even though the pulses were uniformly deadly to all electrical and electronic circuits, human tissue was impervious to T-Rex's high-power electromagnetic beams.

  "Ready for satcom link and hot-mic?" Pence asked.

  His tap on a rear-cockpit display would activate a low-probability-of-intercept satellite communication system that transmitted low-light-TV video and infrared imagery to a windowless control room back at Groom Lake.

  "Hot mic" would allow the mission commander and key executives to hear every word the airmen uttered, throughout the mission. In essence, three high-level officials—the Department of Homeland Security Checkmate director, his DHS boss and Lawhead's chief test pilot—would be riding with the aircrew, monitoring the mission in real time.

  "Hold off a minute," Byrne answered, banking to pick up a southerly heading. He thumb-punched a button on his right throttle and verified the autopilot's altitude-hold and navigation system were operational.

  Satisfied that sophisticated avionics were taking them to their IP or "initial point" north of Las Vegas, roughly a hundred miles away, Byrne relaxed. His eyes never rested though, always scanning the Shadow's instruments and warning panels. For now, everything in his dimly lit airborne office was as it should be.

  "Hey, 'Borg. You still live in Vegas, right?" the pilot asked, using a contraction of the flight test engineer's call sign, "Cyborg."

  "Yeah. West side. In Summerlin."

  Byrne hesitated a beat. "You okay with this? It's your home town, compadre."

  Pence snorted. "Hell, yes! Look, we're just sucking the lifeblood from scuzballs that deserve every frappin' course we're serving up tonight. These cockroaches have been fleecing pigeons for half a century, amassing billions in profits.

  "Besides, the big-gun, organized-gambling crooks were given plenty of opportunities to clean up their Metro sock puppets. They could have yanked old Uriah up by his panties and demanded that he fire those cops, who shot Erik to death. But they didn't.

  "The Metro Marionettes ignored fair and square warnings. Now those Strip billionaires will suffer the consequences of their stupid arrogance!

  "Yeah, Solo. I'm damned okay!"

  Pence was nail-spitting irate. A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, the Lawhead engineer was fanatically passionate about "rights" and "justice," and could quote parts of the U.S. Constitution from memory.

  Byrne stayed silent, letting his GIB vent. He understood Pence's vehemence. Through a quirk of small-world, flight-testing fate, 'Borg and Erik's dad, Win Steele, had been U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School classmates.

  Erik's tragic murder at the hands of Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department cops had ignited a white-hot fury among the class's close-knit members. They'd known Erik, since he was a toddler, when Win was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base, California.

  The back-seater continued heatedly. "Hey, Southern Nevada is the most corrupt patch of dirt in America! Chicago has nothin' on Sin City! Whatever the gonzo-bucks moguls who run the Vegas Strip demand, they get.

  "Need to disappear a hooker's body? No prob-lem! Call nine-one-one—but make sure the good 'ol boy sheriff sends his 'special team' of Metro brown-shirts to the hotel-casino's back door. Can't have a meat wagon and cop cruisers mixing it up with limos and Hollywood glitterati high rollers out front, can we?

  "So, sleazy Mob barons pay off the sheriff and the district attorney, and Metro's loyal do-as-you're-told goons take care of the casinos' ugly business. Been that way for decades. In recent years, though, massive corruption's spread well beyond the Strip, and good folks like Erik are getting killed."

  "You're right," Byrne said evenly. "The bastards executed Erik in cold blood, and the big-bucks Mafia let 'em walk."

  A blinking symbol on his helmet-mounted display ended the banter.

  "Better fire up the satcom. We're ten out."

  In ten minutes, T-Rex would start wreaking its havoc, launching another round of retribution on behalf of Operation Gold Shield… and the late Erik Steele.

  The pilot wiggled his throttles aft, setting up a shallow en route descent.

  "Satcom on. Acquiring," Pence responded, his tone professional again. The satellite communication system's indicator flashed green.

  "Control, Bandit Two Three's with you. Video on," Pence transmitted.

  The satcom's low-probability-of-intercept link was encrypted. Even if a snoopy listener happened to detect the radio signal, he'd hear nothing but static.

  "Two Three, Control copies, loud and clear. Solid video link," a rich voice replied. From the Groom Lake control room, Gray Manor was serving as mission commander, watching the same imagery viewed by the aircrew on their helmet-mounted displays.

  The fact that Manor—who had been awake and overseeing Checkmate missions for most of the past seventy-two hours—and Todd Bright, a Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, were closely tracking the A-17 strike mission, spoke volumes. If something went bad tonight, Bright and Manor would have to explain it to Washington's heavy hitters.

  "IP in two," Pence clipped.

  He and Byrne closely monitored a triangular icon inching down their see-through visor displays. The triangle portrayed their Initial Point, a set of Global Positioning System coordinates marking the southeast corner of the Nellis Air Force Base Small Arms Range, where tonight's T-Rex strike mission would begin.

  Approaching the IP, Byrne leveled the jet at 1,000 feet above the terrain. He banked, turning to a southwesterly heading, as the IP symbol and a winged icon representing his A-17 merged.

  "IP… now," Pence called. "T-Rex armed. Push-broom mode. Auto. Pre-strike checklist complete."

  The terahertz-frequency, electronic-attack system was poised, its thousands of tiny electronic chips ready to automatically fire powerful beams, which would merge to create an invisible fan aimed forty-five-degrees down and directly ahead of the aircraft, straddling the Shadow's flight path. The beam would literally be driven across the Earth's surface in a precise, computer-controlled pattern—like a push-broom across a floor.

  Byrne cross-checked h
is instruments and announced, "On altitude, on heading."

  He nudged twin throttles in his left fist, adjusting airspeed to a hair under 250 knots, the legal limit for aircraft flying below 10,000 feet.

  The bright lights of Las Vegas Boulevard, the world-famous "Strip," stretched before the attack jet, a dazzling highway of color and motion.

  "Keep an eye on the radar, 'Borg. Our friends at McCarran don't know about us," Byrne said, with a hint of worry.

  Flying unannounced into a busy air-traffic control zone, let alone directly toward a busy international airport, at 250 knots, violated every cell in the veteran test pilot's rule-following brain. However, the Federal Aviation Administration's radars should never detect the Shadow.

  "Sure hope this stealth shit works," he muttered. Being busted by the feds and having his pilot's certificate pulled was a distinct possibility.

  "Say again?" Pence asked. He was head down, concentrating, fingers poised above T-Rex's controls.

  "If one of those airline drivers taking off from McCarran turns into us, holler out, okay? Don't assume I see him."

  "Rog. Will do," the engineer replied absently.

  Byrne knew better. Pence would be 120-percent focused on his baby, the T-Rex system, ensuring the fan of terahertz energy was doing its job. It would be Byrne's responsibility to stay clear of other airplanes. Fortunately, very few airliners were taking off and landing at this hour.

  Still, smacking into an aluminum tube stuffed with tourists would be embarrassing. And would definitely ruin his and Pence's night out.

  Byrne eyeballed a red diamond on his helmet-mounted display. It was rapidly approaching a horizontal line representing the north end of T-Rex's target zone. A sensor-fused image, overlaid by a computer-generated trapezoid stretching along the jet's flight path, was dominated by an approaching interstate freeway crossing his field of view.

  "Standby," he said. "Coming up on the five-fifteen."

  "T-Rex armed," Pence said, as Interstate 515 disappeared beneath the A-17's nose. Although the terahertz weapon would activate automatically, controlled by dual-redundant digital processors, the test engineer was prepared to go manual, if the auto-system hiccuped.

  * *

  LAS VEGAS/ALTITUDE = 1,000 FEET

  "We're hot!" Pence called.

  A translucent fan of red appeared on Byrne's display, its vertex touching the aircraft's swept-wing symbol. That fan was a visual representation of high-power terahertz energy frying every electrical system, every electronic device, every microprocessor-controlled gizmo in its path.

  A distinct horizontal line of inky darkness appeared just south of Fremont Street, then pushed south-southwest. As the leading edge of T-Rex's destruction raced ahead of the A-17, thousands of lights instantly blinked out, leaving an ominous trail of black.

  The void stretched a half mile on either side of Las Vegas Boulevard, automatically reaching to the west long enough to blast the Clark County Government Center, a sprawling campus sandwiched between a rail line and Interstate 15. Every security lamp and glowing computer screen in the center winked out.

  Metro police headquarters also faded to black, each light bulb, computer, radio, phone, cipher-door lock and coffeemaker in the five-story complex of three buildings rendered useless.

  The first major hotel-casino falling prey to T-Rex's terahertz beam was the Stratosphere, a tall, slender structure towering above the Strip. Halogen bulbs popped throughout the windowless casino. Thousands of microprocessor chips in video-poker and slot machines sizzled and died in microseconds.

  Fast-rising pulses fired at billions per second from T-Rex's transmitter array generated brief, powerful spikes of electrical current through every wire, resistor, capacitor, diode and microscopic transistor embedded in thousands of integrated circuits. Those bursts of high-amperage current destroyed sophisticated chips buried in casino gaming hardware, surveillance cameras and recorders, flat-screen televisions, elevator control panels, handheld smartphones and iPads, laptop computers, electronic wristwatches, and security-guard radios.

  Within seconds, the Stratosphere became a silent tower of darkness.

  "Holy shit!" Byrne breathed, awed by the merciless, highly visible power of the A-17's electromagnetic-pulse weapon. The mile-wide span of T-Rex's beam carved an ebony band through the brilliant ocean of Las Vegas lights, as if a giant bulldozer had scraped the terrain clean. Not one spark of illumination remained. As it screamed overhead, the stealthy Shadow erased every photon in its path.

  Like a wildfire sweeping through golden grain, T-Rex blanked the lights of one hotel-casino and resort after another, transforming gleaming towers to multistory, black tombstones. Sahara, Circus-Circus, Riviera, Trump's golden edifice, the elegant Wynn and Treasure Island. All were darkened in a wink.

  Cars, buses, limousines and police cruisers that packed the sleepless Strip ground to a halt, their chip-intense ignition systems and headlights zapped. No smoke, no fire, no outward sign of destruction. Everything electrical merely ceased to function.

  Byrne pressed his jet's left rudder and countered with an outboard nudge of the control stick—a right-aileron input to keep the sinister Shadow's wings perfectly level—which swung the nose to a due-south heading. The smooth flat-turn ensured the attack jet's flight path stayed directly over the Strip, as the multilane road angled left in front of the gold-faced Mirage and stately Venetian hotel-casinos.

  "Shit hot, dude!" Pence exclaimed. "Didn't even nick the freeway!"

  Byrne half-smiled. Even a few degrees of left bank would have allowed T-Rex's energy beam to sweep across the freeway, unintentionally disabling vehicles on I-15.

  "No pileups over there, thanks to one-each Sierra Hotel stick-actuator!" Pence hooted.

  Byrne raised a left fist, visible to Pence in the rear cockpit. The silent hand signal warned, Watch it, 'Borg! Bosses are listening.

  "Aw, crap," Pence muttered. Enthusiasm had trumped professionalism. He wasn't accustomed to having government big shots tagging along, even virtually, during operational missions.

  "No worries, 'Borg," Gray Manor chuckled. "Doing a great job. Let's wrap it up," he radioed, subtly urging the crew to stay focused.

  "Roger that," Pence said, chastened.

  Beyond the A-17's nose, the lights of shoulder-to-shoulder resorts hugging the boulevard vanished: Flamingo Hilton. Caesars. Barbary Coast. Venetian. Bally's. Bellagio. Paris Las Vegas. Monte Carlo. New York New York. MGM Grand. The aging Tropicana. San Remo. Excalibur.

  All disappeared into the lengthening swath of blackened gloom.

  "Crossing Tropicana," Pence announced, as the jet streaked across the east-west thoroughfare marking the northern edge of McCarran International Airport.

  "Beam's reconfigured," he added.

  The eastern half of T-Rex's beam was switched off to avoid sweeping across the airfield. Seconds later, the lights of Luxor, Mandalay Bay and Four Seasons winked out. For the first time in most memories, an intense beam of white shooting vertically from the tip of Luxor's distinctive pyramid was gone.

  "Breaking off," the pilot announced, wrenching the A-17's side stick to the right and pulling. His left hand shoved both throttles up to the military-power detent, just shy of afterburner.

  The nimble jet responded, standing on its right wing. Byrne and Pence grunted under the weight of high g-forces, subconsciously tightening gut and leg muscles to keep blood in their craniums.

  When the Shadow's electronic compass approached 270 degrees, due west, Byrne rolled to wings-level. He tweaked his steed's pitch angle, bringing the nose well above the western horizon's jagged mountains, faintly visible on his night-vision display.

  Pence modified T-Rex's configuration and cross-checked a long list of GPS coordinates, ensuring the system was reset.

  "Oooo-kay," he drawled. "Level at four-thousand and pick up the alignment circle. System's in spot mode. Auto and armed."

  "Intersecting the circle now."

  Byrne ret
racted the throttles, banked momentarily, rolled wings-level again, and thumbed a button on his side-stick controller, activating the bird's autopilot.

  "Cleared to fire,'Borg."

  The Shadow would fly a roughly circular pattern centered on the Las Vegas Strip's midpoint, an orbit defined by preloaded navigational waypoints. That flight track ensured the T-Rex system would have a clear line-of-sight to all remaining targets.

  Pence confirmed T-Rex's beam-pointing system was configured to automatically fire high-power electromagnetic energy at discrete targets scattered throughout the sprawling Las Vegas valley.

  "We're hot," he said, eyes sweeping across columns of mind-numbing data, watching closely as green numbers flashed to red, one line after another, as each target was engaged.

  Narrow beams of pulses were being fired from a flat-face array of solid-state transmitter units concealed in the "canoe," a long radome under the A-17's belly. The invisible streams of terahertz pulses traveled at the speed of light, slamming into the city's remaining hotel-casinos and obliterating electrical and electronic systems by the thousands.

  A single orbit left gaping holes in the sprawling mosaic of Las Vegas radiance, as T-Rex blasted hotel-casinos sprinkled throughout the valley: Rio. Gold Coast. Palms. Suncoast. All the Station casinos, including Red Rocks, Palace, Green Valley Ranch, Aliante, Santa Fe, Texas and Sunset.

  If a casino complex boasted more than a dozen video-poker and slot machines, T-Rex zapped it, turning cavernous gambling parlors and thousands of hotel rooms into light-devoid caves.

  "Control, Bandit Two Three. T-Rex's going standby," Pence finally announced. "All targets engaged and… neutralized."

  "Copy, Two Three," Manor replied. "It appears T-Rex was incredibly effective. Good job, gents."

  The retired general's tone was disturbingly matter of fact, Pence thought.

  "Looks that way," the engineer agreed.

  In the control room, Manor, Todd Bright and Bud Rusk, Lawhead Corporation's site manager and chief test pilot, scrutinized the real-time video transmitted from Bandit 23. The stocky, balding Rusk had flown more than his share of dicey flight test sorties and dozens of off-the-books reconnaissance and strike missions across the globe. But the scope of nonlethal, widespread devastation T-Rex had dealt Las Vegas was astonishing.