Category 7

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  He swung his head to meet her eyes, which were lit with undisguised loathing. It was a look he was used to receiving, so it didn’t bother him. Her words did.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said you share the blame for Simone. You played fast and loose with the jet stream because of the same God complex that drove Carter Thompson to bring the ocean to a boil.”

  He felt his jaw clench as anger ripped through him, but he didn’t respond until he had himself under control. “Sometimes things have to get really bad before they can get better, Colonel. Having spent your entire military career behind a desk looking at weather maps, you wouldn’t know what it’s like to have even one person’s life in your hands, much less the lives of millions, so I will just say this to you: Never again make the mistake of associating me with a terrorist. You have no fucking idea what I do or why I do it.”

  “Nor do I want to know, Mr. Taylor. I’m sure your background includes lots of sordid experiences, like interrogating—”

  “You’re wrong, Colonel. I’ve never interrogated anyone. You know who they choose to be interrogators?” he replied, his voice once again cool and unconcerned. “The pussies who can’t handle the real dirty work.”

  She looked suitably shocked and offended, so he went in for the kill.

  “Your first name is Patricia, isn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “That was my wife’s name.”

  “What is this, a foxhole confession?” she said, looking away and taking her last, deep drag on the cigarette. Her hands had developed a slight tremble in the last ten seconds.

  “Maybe.” He paused for a beat. “I don’t really care whether you or anyone else likes me or respects me or respects what I do, but I resent being called a terrorist.”

  She nodded once. “You made your point.”

  “No, I don’t think I did.” He turned to face her, folding his arms across his chest. “I worked for the Agency for twenty-six years and then I retired. I set up a small business making furniture, reproductions of French period pieces.” He watched her eyebrows go up. “I’ve always been good with my hands, Colonel. But one day, one of my tools slipped and I cut myself pretty badly. The nurse in the ER was the kindest person I’d ever met. Never asked questions, just took me as I was. I married her three months later. We had two sons.”

  “Let me guess. Then she left you?” Her tone was sarcastic, but her voice had gone husky.

  “Yes, she did. We were on a vacation at her family’s summer house on Martha’s Vineyard. I left early to finish something for a client. Patricia and the boys were due home two days later, but their plane was diverted into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.”

  Her sharp intake of breath was followed by a stifled sob.

  “A few days later, my old boss called me and asked if I would come back to help out. And here I am.” He paused and watched her founder in a stew of unwanted emotions.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Taylor. I’m really very sorry for your loss,” she said, stumbling over the words.

  “Thank you, Colonel Brannigan.” He turned back to face the storm.

  It wasn’t until she’d gone back inside and he heard the door close behind her that he allowed himself a grim smile.

  Tuesday, July 24, 12:40 A.M., Atlantic Ocean,

  aboard the USS William J. Clinton

  Kate followed Jake into the captain’s office. It was nicer than any other room she’d seen on the ship, with wood paneling, furniture that looked like it might have come from Ethan Allen, and nice, real carpeting. It was crowded, though. The admiral and the captain were already there, as were several other officers, some of whom she’d met and some she hadn’t, and a civilian who clearly wasn’t having a good day.

  Captain Smith turned to Jake and Kate and asked them—told them, really—to sit down.

  “The drones didn’t work, and that’s all we were authorized to do,” she said with no preamble. “I don’t want to test my ship by keeping her near the storm without a good reason.” She paused. “The admiral and I have been in contact with the Secretary of Defense and have received authorization to deploy a new weapon that we have aboard for field trials.” She glanced over at the civilian. “Dr. Przypek, this is Jake Baxter and this is Kate Sherman, the meteorologists I told you about. Would you give them the two-dollar rundown of the weapon?”

  The man stepped forward, clearly not in his element. Short, stocky, and with shaggy dark hair in need of more than a trim, he wore a faded blue golf shirt with some undecipherable corporate logo on the front of it, faded jeans, and sneakers.

  “Hi. I’m Kevin.” He cleared his throat and went on. “The weapon is called the Cold Core Endoatmospheric High-Energy Light Propagator, or C2EHELP. We call it ‘Cold Day in Hell,’” he said with a grim, tight smile that Kate thought looked alien on his puppy-doggish face. “It fires a cold-core particle beam at an aerial target, freezing it on contact.”

  Kate just stared at him. Jake, after a minute, shrugged and shook his head.

  “Maybe you should give me the ten-dollar explanation. Sounds too much like what we’ve already tried except with cold instead of heat.”

  The civilian laughed. The rest of the room’s occupants remained silent and tense.

  “It’s not a laser. The beam is composed of subatomic particles called przypeks—I discovered them, that’s why they’re named after me. They exist only at temperatures around eighty-five kelvins, which is pretty cold. Did you see that big round thing circling the ship at the waterline? Looks like a metal inner tube?” he asked, a hopeful smile on his face.

  This guy is nuts. Kate shook her head in the negative. So did Jake.

  “Oh.” The academic’s disappointment was so evident that if they’d hadn’t been in such an intense situation, Kate knew she would have laughed.

  “Well, that’s the accelerator that produces them.” He stopped again, then shrugged. “Long story short, when the particles accrete and we have enough mass, we can launch them from a cannon and shoot them through the atmosphere at a target.”

  “Don’t they heat up the second they hit the air?” Jake asked with a little more sharpness in his voice than was strictly necessary.

  Kevin frowned a little. “Well, yeah, some of them do. The particles comprising the outer layers of the beam degrade. But since the particles are traveling at the speed of light, they reach their target before any appreciable heat can attenuate the core, which is significantly more dense than the outer layers. When the core hits the target—usually the superheated engine of a rocket or an aircraft—the particles freeze it instantly and it drops from the sky. Usually it explodes, too.” He shrugged. “No sweat, no threat.”

  Kate cleared her throat. “So we’re going to aim this beam at the hurricane?”

  Kevin glanced at her. “Well, yes and no. The cannon is powerful, but it’s a precision instrument. Its aperture is pretty small, only five centimeters in diameter, and the cannon has to be in a fixed position when you’re firing it. So you’d have to aim it at something more specific than ‘the hurricane.’”

  “Like what?” Jake snorted. “There’s nothing fixed in a cyclonic storm. It’s volatile and in motion by definition.”

  “What sort of distance does it cover?” Kate asked, ignoring Jake’s question.

  “It’s meant for short-distance fighting, to the horizon but not over it. Its range is about twenty-five kilometers.” He shrugged. “The beam could go farther. It depends on environmental conditions. I mean, in space, we’re talking—”

  “How about at sea level?” Jake interrupted sharply. “In a hot, highly turbulent environment with lots of water vapor? Will it bounce?”

  “They,” he corrected. “No, the particles won’t bounce, but as you’re implying, the density of the atmosphere the beam is traversing will increase the rate of attenuation. We should be as close as we can get to the target.”

  “Which would be the eye?” the captain asked.

  The
physicist shrugged. “That’s your call.”

  “The storm cell itself,” Jake said. “The point of convection, at the top—”

  “What about the water?” Kate asked, and all eyes turned to her.

  “The water?” the captain repeated incredulously. “The stuff the ship depends on to float? You want to freeze that?”

  Kate met her eyes. “A five-centimeter-wide beam aimed at an eye a few miles wide might not do much damage. Just a guess.”

  “She’s got a point.” All eyes swung back to the physicist. “The sensors and software the device relies on for targeting seek high-speed infrared signatures. Even though a cyclonic storm releases a lot of heat, I don’t think it qualifies as an ideal target. The beam, as I said, is narrow. It’s designed to hit relatively small targets, so it might not create enough of an effect to stop the convection cycle, or even destabilize it.”

  “Any effort at destabilization should take place as low as possible in the storm, as close to the fuel source as we can get. That’s what we were trying to do with the drones, right? Stop the convective towers from building? Well, this could go one better. If nothing is coming up the pipeline, the convective towers are going to collapse.” Kate turned to the scientist, who was grinning now. “Can you aim it at the water?”

  “We’ve never tested it, but I don’t see why we can’t try it. The cold would diffuse, but I’m not sure in what direction.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, outward across the surface, or down into the water column. I suppose either would work, wouldn’t it?”

  “Look, you two,” the captain interrupted. “Is this going to work? Because either we try this right now or we have to haul serious ass out of here.” She looked from the scientist to Kate and then to Jake. “What do you think?”

  “I think we have no other choice but to try it,” he replied.

  “How soon can we deploy?” the captain asked over her shoulder.

  “Thirty-five minutes,” the weapons officer replied. “The accelerator has been on standby since we departed Dover.”

  The captain turned back to them and gave them the look that had no doubt won her her command. “This had better work.”

  There was a definite motion to the ship now, and Kate was wishing she’d taken a pass on the opportunity to be in the glass-walled control room in “the island,” the command center that stood several stories above the carrier’s deck. Ordinarily it was used for monitoring flight operations, but the aviation team had relinquished their space and she, Jake, Kevin, and the captain were up there to oversee the first deployment of the Cold Day in Hell.

  “Are you sure that cannon isn’t just going to snap off and come flying back here to kill us?” Kate whispered to Kevin as she stood next to where he was sitting at a computer terminal.

  Kevin, Jake, and the captain looked at her, their expressions ranging from amusement to exasperation.

  “That baby is built for battle. Nothing’s going to blow it off the deck. Besides, it has a very low profile. It only comes up a few feet. Everything has to stay supercooled.”

  “We don’t lose too many things over the side, Kate. Maybe the odd skeptic,” Captain Smith said dryly, and turned her eyes back to the many monitors ranged before them.

  The storm’s fury had intensified to the point at which it had surpassed what would have made it a Category 6 or even higher on the Saffir-Simpson Scale—if such categories existed. Its pressure was lower, its wind speed higher, its forward speed greater, and its eye tighter than all other storms in recorded history. And it was still heading straight toward the New York Bight.

  “Okay, I think it’s showtime,” Kevin said, his fingers stilling over the keyboard for the first time in at least half an hour.

  Jake looked at him. “You think it is?”

  Kevin grinned. “Okay. It’s showtime.”

  The control room, which had been working at a quiet hum, went still.

  “We need the cannon on deck,” the captain said, and the command was repeated by a uniformed sailor sitting at a console facing away from the deck.

  “Cannon’s coming up,” the seaman announced a moment later.

  At the far edge of the deck, Kate saw part of the floor slide away and a squat, heavy-looking box rise up in its place.

  “That’s the cannon?” she asked.

  “The back of it,” Kevin replied, pride in his voice as his fingers started flying over the keyboard again.

  “Is this some kind of a joke?” the captain snapped in a voice that froze everyone in their tracks. Kate turned to look at her, her heart thumping.

  The captain’s face had gone white and her eyes were spitting fire at the grim-faced sailor who had just handed her a piece of paper.

  “No, ma’am.”

  The captain brought her gaze to Kate’s face, then moved on to Jake and Kevin. “The Statue of Liberty was blown over four minutes ago.” She swallowed hard, still staring at Kevin. “You make this work. You make this work.”

  After a few seconds, the physicist turned quietly back to his console. His voice shaking audibly, he said, “The aperture is opening. Setting is three degrees above the horizon. Three, two, one. Go.”

  A silvery-blue translucent beam shot into infinity from twenty feet above the starboard bow, freezing everything in its path. The waves, easily one hundred feet tall, froze through their middles, sending car-sized chunks of ice crashing to the deck with the unstoppable momentum of the moving water surrounding them. Shards of solid white water tens of feet long bucked into the air, somersaulting over the deck, smashing into anything that lay in their path. Kate ducked as one came flying straight for the island and crashed into the thick Plexiglas window shielding the story below where they stood.

  “God almighty, look at this,” Jake shouted, and Kate and Joanna clustered next to him. The side-by-side high-definition infrared satellite images showed wide and tight views of the storm. Kate’s eyes flicked from one to the other. The wide focus showed a dark blue line skewering the red-hot heart of the storm and continuing for a hundred miles out to sea before fading to green and then disappearing from the screen. The tight focus showed the eye only, bisected by blue with greens and yellow radiating from it in all directions.

  After a minute of near-reverent or maybe disbelieving silence, the blue line then disappeared from the screen and all eyes turned back to Kevin.

  “What?” he asked, still shaken.

  “Where did it go? Why did you turn it off?” Jake demanded.

  Kevin looked at him like he was crazy. “It was on longer than it’s supposed to be. It’s sort of point and click, right? Except that it’s point and zap.”

  “Well, reload,” Jake snorted.

  Kevin frowned. “Well … we can’t.”

  “We can’t?” Jake repeated, practically snarling. “That one blast ain’t doing enough, pal. You have to do it again.”

  Kevin looked faintly shocked. “Look, we’re talking about subatomic particles, not bombs or bullets. You don’t just go to a storeroom and get some more.”

  “What do you do?”

  He looked bewildered by the question. “You create them in a particle accelerator. It—it takes a while.”

  “You said there’s one on board. Come on, Kevin—”

  “There is, but it’s not like a toaster, Jake. It—”

  “Jake, quit being an ass.” Kate grabbed him by the shoulder. “Take another look at the screen. It worked.”

  “It did?” Kevin jumped up and nearly tripped in his haste to get to the monitor.

  The blue had completely disappeared, and although the residual heat of the storm had closed in, trying to reestablish equilibrium and reenergize the cell, Simone’s engine had been severely destabilized.

  The silence in the room was palpable, broken only by the occasional boulders of ice hitting the deck.

  “Will it hold?” The captain’s question was quiet, but her voice was fraying with emotion around the ed
ges.

  Jake turned to her. “It’s too early to know. But if the heat’s dropping, the winds will be dropping. Can we send in some more drones to attack the smaller towers before they can re-form? The debris from the earlier one is probably long gone by now.”

  The captain swallowed visibly, keeping her face more or less expressionless, then nodded and gave the command to get the drones ready for deployment. Then she turned command over to the executive officer and excused herself.

  Kate found her in the officers’ head a few minutes later, pale, shaking, splashing water on her face and rinsing out her mouth.

  “You did a hell of a job, Captain,” Kate said softly.

  Leaning on the sink, trying to keep the emotion off her frighteningly pale face, Joanna Smith looked at her. “Glad you think so. That’s not how the Navy will see it. All they’ll see is that I put eight thousand lives in mortal danger, and caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage to my ship. I’ll be relieved of my command before it really started.”

  “Not a person on this ship was harmed, Joanna. You saved millions of lives.”

  The captain forced a smile.

  Making a split-second decision that could land her in serious trouble, Kate folded her arms across her chest and looked the captain in the eye. “Did you know the storm was man-made and the target was the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant? Well, it was and it was. So the hell with what the Navy says. You’re a hero.”

  Her eyes widened. “Were you supposed to tell me that?”

  Kate shrugged. “I doubt it. But if you tell anyone, I’ll tell your crew that I found you tossing your cookies.”

  That drew a genuine, if exhausted, smile from the captain. “If I tell anyone what?”

  “Never saw you,” Kate replied with a pretty inept salute.

  When Kate returned to the bridge, much of the tension in the room had faded. Although Simone was still dangerous, the clean, clear cyclonic shape that had defined the storm on the screens had become distorted. The winds were still high enough to do some serious damage and the waves were still crashing against the bow, which sat many stories above the waterline, with undiminished ferocity, but on the screens the center of the turbulence was orange with lots of yellow rather than glowing red.