Linda replaced and tightened the cargo strap over Vivian’s lap. “We’re going forward now,” she said, “but I’ll be back shortly.”
FBI HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, D.C.—6:05 P.M. EDT
The news of the crash at Pax River left Tony DiStefano and his team in shock. While dozens of military and civilian employees scrambled to find someone else with expertise in defusing a nonstandard home-brew nuclear device, the reality had sunk in that their best chance for defusing the Medusa Weapon had probably been lost in the wreckage of the Grumman.
“What do you want us to do, Tony?” one of the team asked quietly after he’d briefed them.
Tony DiStefano let out a long sigh and pointed in the general direction of the Potomac River.
“I just got word from the director. The Pentagon is taking over, in order to, as he put it, unify this effort. It’s their game now. We just tag along and assist.”
“So what’s the bottom line? We get blamed for the tornado and the plane crash?” Donna asked.
Tony waved away the question with obvious irritation. “It’s a turf war, what else? If it’s a nuke, it’s military.”
“Do they know about the likelihood Mrs. Henry’s the perpetrator?” Donna asked.
“You’re going to make sure they do, right, Donna?”
“If that’s an order.”
“It is.” Tony looked around, catching everyone’s eyes. “Okay, we’ve still got to apprehend Mrs. Henry when the plane lands, but the military brass are going to have to deal with the bomb.”
“You think they’ll screw it up?” Bill asked.
“Were you in the military?” Tony asked.
The agent nodded.
“So was I. Air Force.”
“Army here.”
“Okay. Given your experiences and your knowledge of how innovative and intuitive and subtle the military mind usually is, do you feel confident about their handling what is probably the most dangerous single weapon and delicate detonation threat to ever show up on the North American continent?”
Bill nodded solemnly. “I see what you mean. But there’s still the chance it’s not real.”
“No, there’s not.”
The voice caused both men to turn as another agent walked in with a notepad. “Tony, I just got off the phone with the search team from Miami. They swept the Henrys’ home and workshop with Geiger counters and protective suits.”
“Yeah?”
“They found traces of plutonium, and a lead-lined vault in the concrete floor where this Dr. Henry apparently stored it. There was a container there, too, with NRC markings, and two spare nuclear triggers, both of them highly modified. Preliminary theory is, the registered container with that serial number, which is in deep storage at Hanford, Washington, is probably empty.”
“My God!”
Donna was nodding energetically. “I thought so!” She said. “The Henrys had the means, Tony. They had the means and they had the motive. Which means we do indeed have a live one.” She reached to call the Pentagon before Tony could suggest it.
FIFTEEN
AIR FORCE ONE, EN ROUTE TO TOKYO—6:05 P.M. EDT
The President of the United States swung his legs over the edge of the bed and reached for the wall-mounted handset that connected him to the cockpit of Air Force One some one hundred feet away. Sleeping was impossible now, though the First Lady had pulled a pillow over her head and gone back to sleep when the crisis calls began coming in ten-minute intervals.
The colonel in command of the 747 answered almost instantly.
“Jim, we’re going to have to turn around. Get us back to Washington as fast as you can.”
“Yes, sir. We’ll need an in-flight refueling north of Juneau.”
“Whatever it takes. How long to get home?”
“Over, ah, nine and a half hours, sir, approximately. We’re over the western end of the Aleutian chain.”
“This is going to reach a climax long before then, Jim. You’ve been briefed on what’s happening with that 727?”
“Yes, sir.”
The President replaced the interphone and glanced up at the monitor showing their current position. The small computer-generated image of the aircraft was already in a left turn back to the east.
He picked up the telephone handset again and brushed back his hair before punching the appropriate satellite line.
“Okay, Stanley. We’re on the way home. Get everyone in the Starsuite and I’ll meet you there in ten minutes. I’ve got to get dressed.”
“Yes, sir.”
Eight minutes later the unshaven fifty-five-year-old President entered the state-of-the-art Standard Teleconferencing Array Room, a fifteen-by-eighteen-foot walnut-paneled conference chamber designed into the lower deck of the 747, where the Secretary of State, the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, and several aides were waiting. On the other side of the polished walnut table, which bisected the room lengthwise, the National Security Advisor, his deputy, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and four others had gathered. They turned and nodded as the President walked in.
The table appeared to be whole. In fact, only half of the table was actually aboard Air Force One. The other half—along with the other half of the room and the occupants—consisted of semiholographic projections produced by a massive data stream connecting Air Force One through communication satellites to an identical suite recently built next to the Situation Room in the basement of the White House over five thousand miles away.
The President looked his National Security Advisor in the eye and shook his head slightly.
“Amazing technology, Stanley. I always have to suppress the urge to shake your hand again through the screen, or wall, or whatever we call it.”
Stanley nodded. “Agreed. I’d almost swear we were in the same room.”
“I’m damn glad we have it at times like these. Okay, folks,” the President said, looking around and indicating the various chairs, “let’s get to it. What do we know, what are we doing, and where are the decision points?”
Everyone took a seat except the general, who picked up a sheaf of papers and gave a rundown of the Medusa Wave theory, the loss of the nuclear threat reaction team at Pax River, the discovery of trace plutonium in Rogers Henry’s Miami garage, the FBI’s conclusions that Vivian Henry was the perpetrator, and the plan for capturing Mrs. Henry and defusing the bomb in North Carolina. When the general had finished, he found the President’s eyes bore-sighted on his.
“John,” the President began, “why the hell North Carolina? Can’t we find someplace more remote? We’ve managed to get them away from Washington, but we shouldn’t be imperiling any population center.”
“Hurricane Sigrid’s even affecting Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base, sir, but the more remote locations are either too much in the grip of the storm or too far west to reach safely in the time remaining. Remember, we’re severely limited by the time-to-detonation countdown the crew reports the bomb is showing.”
“How much time do we have?”
The general consulted his digital watch. “One hour, forty-six minutes.”
“And the time to landing at Seymour-Johnson?” the President asked.
“Around thirty minutes, sir.”
“And … the time to defuse the damn thing?”
The general hesitated a moment too long before answering, a telltale eternity to the Chief Executive.
“You’re not sure you can defuse it, are you, John?”
“Well, of course not, sir. This is apparently a home-built device. We have no idea until we see it, you know, whether it can be done.”
“And you’ve lost your best people in that Pax River crash, right?”
The general shrugged. “We’ve lost those who were specifically trained for this sort of thing, yes. But we’ve found several others who know what they’re doing.”
“What are the risks they might accidentally set it off while poking around?”
“None, sir, in our opinio
n. They’re being briefed to use extreme caution. They’re also being briefed about Dr. Henry’s expertise, and that of his wife, who’s apparently carrying out his wishes and pretending to be a victim.”
“And if you can’t defuse it, the plan now is to blow it up in place, along with the aircraft?”
The general nodded. “We’ll be wiring high explosives to it the second we secure the airplane. You understand, sir, that nuclear weapons can’t be detonated accidentally, They …”
The President raised his hand to stop the lecture. “I was an Air Force pilot, an aircraft commander in C-141’s both on active duty and in the Reserves, remember, John? I’ve flown nukes around for many years. I’ve had the briefing about emergency disposal probably fifteen times.”
“Sorry, sir, I forgot.”
“Go on, please.”
“The base and surrounding community are already being evacuated, but if we have to blow it, all we’d get is the equivalent of a thousand-pound conventional bomb. Policing up the scattered nuclear material will take several days, though.”
“What about Mrs. Henry? I was told the bomb could sense if she were more than fifteen feet away?”
“The FBI believes that’s a hoax, sir, to give her leverage. In any event, we’re prepared to substitute another radio to mimic whatever weak signal might be coming from her pacemaker, if, by any chance, her statements are correct.”
“John, do you really believe this woman could pull off a stunt like this? I mean, do you believe she could’ve built a Medusa Weapon by herself?”
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs looked around and stared at the President for a few seconds before responding. He began shaking his head. “We’ve formed no opinion about Mrs. Henry. We simply think we’d better treat this bomb as real.”
“Spoken like a good turf player, John, but I want your personal feeling about Mrs. Henry. I didn’t ask ‘we,’ I asked you.”
“I don’t have one,” the general shot back.
“Then get one! You know how I feel about taking personal responsibility and hating bureaucratic bullshit, right? Anyone here think I was just blowing smoke?” The President looked around in all directions as the assembled group on both sides of the screen shook their heads and looked uncomfortable. His eyes returned to the general.
“Okay. Now, John, I want your personal assessment. I approved your taking over control of this crisis from the FBI, so you may end up having to decide this woman’s fate if you can’t separate her safely from her bomb. Do you really think she could pull off a stunt like this with the intention of holding the government of the United States hostage? I know she lost a pension and threatened someone at OPM. I got the whole briefing ten minutes ago from the FBI by phone. But this …?” He let his voice trail off, his skepticism apparent.
“I do find it hard to believe, sir,” the general answered.
The President nodded. “So do I. To me, the way the dead husband has programmed the thing to terrorize his wife sounds very strange. Is there something else going on here?”
The general cocked his head slightly. “Mr. President, I guess I’m not following you.”
The President stood up suddenly and began pacing behind the other chairs on the Air Force One side of the table.
“I’m trying to anticipate the boxes we may find ourselves in within the next two hours. There are two vastly different pictures of this Mrs. Henry. One, an angry, vengeful ex-wife threatening the nation and the U.S. government, a picture that could, conceivably, include a monstrous suicide plan. The other picture, however, is of an abused former spouse conned by her dying husband into innocently taking a nuclear weapon to the Pentagon after his death, a weapon programmed to at least terrorize her if not kill her in the end.
“The Bureau thinks the woman in the first scenario is masquerading as the woman in the second scenario. Perpetrator playacting the victim. If that’s true, we’ll have to handle things very carefully at Seymour-Johnson. She could, for instance, drop the façade and claim she has her finger on the trigger, and if our forces don’t back off or do whatever, she’ll push the button long before we could get the thing neutralized. But if it’s not true and we make a mistake in our assumption, we may waste a lot of time trying to get around her when all we have to do is ask the crew to open the doors. We’re dealing with a massive, historic threat here. I don’t want to lose any time because of assumptions. That’s why I’m belaboring this. I think we’ve jumped to a conclusion.” He sat back down with a thud.
The National Security Advisor had been conferring with the Press Secretary in the background. He stood suddenly.
“Ah, Mr. President …”
The President gestured for him to wait.
“One thing I need to know from you, General. We originally had a plan, I’m told, to pull the crew off, put our own pilots on board with parachutes, fly this thing offshore, let it go on autopilot, and bail out while it flies off to explode. Now we’re going to try to defuse it. Do we really need that bomb’s technology badly enough to risk a detonation? Is it worth that level of risk, for God’s sake?”
The general was shaking his head. “We don’t believe we’re taking any risks of accidental detonation by trying to defuse it, but it’s a Catch-22, Mr. President. If that really is a Medusa Weapon, we must get the technology first. If it’s not a Medusa, we could easily dump it at sea with no impact on national security.”
The President was shaking his head. “General, you’re talking about the Wave. I’m talking about killing American men, women, and children, devastating the economy of North Carolina, blinding people, giving them cancer, and traumatizing an entire nation. I know the Medusa Wave is a far worse societal threat, but I hope you haven’t forgotten the human cost if you’re wrong and this damn thing detonates.”
“I wasn’t implying, sir …”
The President held up his hand. “You say our national interests demand that we try to get the technology. I hope and pray you’re right, but I want you to keep the other option open as well. I want you to have a C-141 or a C-5 or a C-17 standing by, ready to go. Instead of blowing it up at Seymour, if you can’t turn it off, take it out and dump it.” He looked closely at the civilians in the Situation Room, five thousand miles away. “Any of those transports, as you know, can open their rear cargo doors and dump cargo in flight. If our experts decide they can’t defuse it, or defusing is improbable, stop right there and fly it offshore. If there’s real promise, okay, keep working with the explosives backing you up, but I’d rather dump it than run any real risk of detonation on American soil.” His gaze shifted from the National Security Advisor back to the general. “John, can we get a transport aircraft in place in time?”
The general nodded. “Yes, sir. We’ll scramble a C-141 out of Charleston right now. It’s not far. But there’s another problem.”
“Yes?”
“If we blow it up at Seymour, we get no Medusa Wave. If we detonate it at sea by dumping it, we could easily get the full force of the Wave it’s designed to generate.”
The President sat examining the general’s face in silence for a few seconds before turning to Shapiro.
“Okay, Stanley, what else?”
“Sir, we’ve got a public panic developing. The media is reporting an armed nuclear bomb flying around. We’re going to have to say something.”
“We’ve denied everything to this point, I take it?” the President asked, turning to the Press Secretary, who nodded.
“Yes, but they’ve got the Medusa Effect nailed, as well as the effects of a nuclear burst over a populated area. That’s what the panic’s about. Naturally the facts are becoming confused. But the switchboards are also heating up with some pretty important corporate heads demanding help on protecting their data-processing systems.”
“What are we telling them?”
“I … well, not much. Officially, we haven’t acknowledged there’s a problem.”
“Okay, that changes as of now. Do we have an
yone with the expertise to advise what to do to protect computer systems?” The President looked around at the array of blank faces. “That’s our main vulnerability, right?”
A young man in a bow tie on the Washington side of the table cleared his throat and the National Security Advisor gestured toward him. “Mr. President, I invited Dr. Ralph Jensen over here from the Office of Technology Assessment. He’s an expert on EMP’s.” He turned toward Jensen, who looked marginally terrified. “Doctor?”
“Welcome, Dr. Jensen. Please help us out here,” the President prompted. “If this thing should cause a Medusa Wave, what will we lose, and what can we advise people to do ahead of time?”
Dr. Jensen surveyed the faces on both sides of the screen and cleared his throat several times before answering in a surprisingly strong voice.
“Sir, in a nutshell, there’s almost nothing that can be done if we get a true continent-wide Medusa Wave. You’d need heavy metal shielding around every computer-based device, and no one has time to do that. The silicon chips themselves in most systems will have their internal switching gates melted. If the systems are shut down, though, and no data streams are being processed, the computer tapes will, for the most part, be unaffected. You should advise anyone with a critical or big system, like a bank or stock exchange, to shut it down immediately and store the data tapes and disks as deeply as they can. All disks, tapes, and other storage media will probably survive if not being used at the moment it occurs. But all the computer hardware will have to be replaced.”
“When you say ‘all,’ Doctor, what exactly do you mean?”
The young scientist shook his head. “I mean that virtually every silicon-based processor a Medusa Wave hits will be permanently ruined. I’m talking about each and every silicon processing circuit. You … also should know that late-model airliners may lose all engine power and have to make forced landings. I’d recommend all air traffic involving aircraft with computer engine controls be grounded immediately nationwide, including Air Force One, since I understand it’s got computer engine controls, or FEDACs.” He paused, watching the Chief Executive, who leaned forward immediately.
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