Blood Covenent, page 33
“Yeah, I was just figuring that out.”
“We want you to dump the bomb in the Chesapeake Bay,” continued Louis.
The ocean was one thing, but Chesapeake Bay is a crowded waterway during the summer months. Besides the regular traffic, there were ferries to the outer islands, sport fisherman, and pleasure yachts.
“How big a bomb we talking about?” he asked quickly.
“The biggest,” replied Louis quickly.
“You tell me we got a nuke—”
“Yes, yes!” came the hurried response. “We’re on an open line.”
Not your average pipe bomb.
“It just gets better and better,” mumbled Peter to no one in particular. He shut down the radio and demanded, “Did you two know about this?”
“Not exactly,” hedged the older cop.
“What exactly do you know?” he snapped.
* * * *
Pentagon
Louis stared at the dead telephone in his hand. “He cut us off.”
George squinted at the main display. “He’s still running towards the water.”
“Do we have a visual on him yet?”
“Another minute,” replied the lieutenant. An F-18Hornet was streaking southward towards an intercept point on the JetRanger’s course. There would be some complaints as the sonic boom rattled crockery and windowpanes.
“Make sure you don’t spook him,” cautioned George.
The JetRanger’s maximum range circle contracted. The red arc was beyond the southern edge of Maryland at a place called Point Lookout State Park. The widest part of the Bay seemed to be at the very limits of the JetRanger’s range. The margin for error was shrinking and the ability to ensure a drop over water was getting trickier. “What happened?” asked Louis.
“The new circle represents the actual range of this JetRanger based on current speed and heading and weather conditions. The average speed is one hundred twenty-three miles per hour. That means we’ve got roughly sixty miles to work with before detonation.” The Lieutenant displayed a pointer around Point Lookout. “He’s twenty minutes from Point Lookout State Park, another ten minutes takes him to a spot where the ferry lanes run between Tangier Island, Rhodes Point, and the Virginia coastline. The main shipping lane runs through the middle of that as well. So, we don’t have sixty miles to work with,” he concluded.
George walked across the room to look at the map. “How much room is there between Point Lookout State Park and the Virginia coastline?” He tapped the map. “Where the Potomac empties into the Bay,” he added.
“About six miles, sir,” replied one of the captains at the plot table. “It narrows to about four miles when you get to St. George Island.”
“Not much room for error,” grumbled Carnady.
Twenty-nine minutes.
* * * *
JetRanger
Peter scowled. Panic threatened to overwhelm, and it might have succeeded if it were not for something his father had taught him.Panic, and you quit thinking. Quit thinking, and you die. He took a deep breath and focused on his flying, but his thoughts kept going back to the ticking bomb behind him.What if it went off early? Is it leaking radiation? Am I going to die?
“You two know aboutthis? ” he snapped.
“We knew there was a bomb, that this was a bomb,” corrected the younger cop, “But we had no idea it wasthat kind of bomb.”
Truth seemed to be in short supply. “You think the geniuses on the other end of the line can help?”
“I think we need all the help we can get,” replied the older cop.
Peter nodded, and decided somewhere in those moments not to panic. He imagined his father smiling. He checked the pesky fuel gauge and explained, “They want us to dump it somewhere in the Chesapeake Bay. That could get tricky.” He chuckled to himself at his own understatement.
“So what do you want us to do?” asked the older cop. His voice was calmer.
“I need you to position the weapon next to the side door so we can shove it out. I also want you to get yourselves secured to the chicken straps using the lifelines. This is going to be a bit tight.”
He flipped the radio back on and said, “I’m back.”
* * * *
Pentagon
Louis slammed his fist into his palm and said, “Good.”
“Where am I supposed to get rid of this thing?” asked Peter. Louis and George noted the tremor in his voice. The voice/stress analyzer monitoring the radio transmission was spiking.
Twenty-five minutes.
“We want you to fly due south beyond the southern tip of Maryland. It’s a place called Point Lookout State Park,” explained George. He sipped some coffee.
The lieutenant popped up from his console and said, “Sir, I have the White House on the line.”
“What do those idiots want?” growled Louis as he switched lines.
“Edwards, what’s this I hear about the Supreme Court?” boomed the Chief of Staff. The lieutenant quickly switched off the loud speaker.
“We found another bomb, sir,” Louis said quietly and waited for the explosion.
“Bomb! Well, did you disarm it?”
Louis reminded himself he was speaking to one of the most powerful men in the administration. The Chief of Staff runs the White House and the White House runs the President. “We weren’t able to disarm it.”
“Why not?” he demanded. “I thought your man Harper was on top of the problem,” he snapped. Louis could almost see the knives sharpening for his own dismemberment. “Is that why the Secret Service hustled the President out of the White House fifteen minutes ago?”
Louis paused. How would the Secret Service know?
“Sir, there’s going to be another explosion.”
“What!” he snarled louder. Very shortly, they would no longer need a phone line to hear the Chief of Staff. Simply opening a window so he could holler across the Potomac would be sufficient. “We have codes—”
“The bomb’s keyboard was missing. We’ve opted to get as far away from people as possible.”
“You’re dumping it in the ocean. Good idea,” concluded the Chief of Staff.
Louis decided to let the man live with his illusion. “I need to get back to the problem at hand, sir.”
“Sure, sure.” He hung up.
George glanced sideways at Louis and said, “He thinks we’re dropping it in the ocean.”
“He probably won’t know the difference.”
Seventeen minutes.
* * * *
JetRanger
Peter looked through the canopy and saw kids swimming off Scotland Beach, and fishermen in boats off Point Lookout. The park was filled with campers. He wheeled the JetRanger around and asked, “How much time we got?”
“A little over eight minutes,” replied the younger cop.
He keyed his radio and said, “We’ve got a problem,” he didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ve too many people down here. When I drop this thing, it’s going to create a wave and that will probably generate some sort of undertow as well. I can’t drop the bomb off Point Lookout.”
“Peter!” came the urgent voice he knew as Richard, “An air burst will kill and maim a lot more.”
“I ain’t dropping this thing on a bunch of kids!” he shouted. “I got to live with myself after this is over.”It might end in eight minutes, whispered fear somewhere from the shadows.
“Hold on.”
“I am holding on,” he hissed. This time fear pushed towards the front of his consciousness. As long as he was flying, he had something to occupy his mind. It kept him thinking about eternity, and suddenly he wondered if the Billy Graham types might know something. Church never seemed very important, but meeting Jesus unprepared frightened him more than the bomb.God, I promise to go to church if you get me out of this mess. He realized just as quickly as he asked for help that God was very familiar with empty promises.
“Peter, start going east northeast. You’ll come across two islands. The southern one is called South Marsh Island; the other one is Bloodworth Island. Bloodworth is a US Naval Reservation. According to your transponder, you’re about sixteen miles away.”
Peter pulled the yoke towards the east and opened the throttle wide. His fuel tanks were getting towards vapor territory. He started doing the math in his head. To cover sixteen miles at one hundred twenty-five miles per hour would take seven and half minutes. He keyed his radio again. “That’s cutting it pretty close.”
“Yes, about thirty seconds is all you’ll have to dump the bomb,” agreed Louis.
Seven minutes.
* * * *
Pentagon
Louis clasped his hands behind his back staring at the map displayed on the main screen. The red line encircling the white locator dot was getting tighter and tighter. George sat down in the high-backed command chair and said quietly, “We’re relying on a forty-year-old copter jockey.”
Louis nodded, “Nothing very remarkable in his dossier.”
“No,” agreed George. “Just a guy playing by the rules and doing what we asked of him.”
“An extraordinary day,” concluded Louis.
Three minutes.
“Hello?” Came Peter’s disembodied voice. Fear was barely under control. The stress analyzer was starting to flat line and peg at the high stress level.
“Yes. We’re here,” replied Louis, safe in our bombproof situation room.
“I’m running out of fuel. I’ve got maybe two minutes left. I can see the island.” His sentences were punctuated with short breaths and his thinking seemed rather disjointed.
“Peter, we’re dispatching two rescue choppers from the Marine Base at Quantico,” said Louis. George leaned forward issuing the orders.
“Can you make land fall?” asked Louis.
“That’s just it, I don’t know. I’ve got to slow down so we can open the door and shove this thing overboard.”
The red line indicating the JetRanger’s range was shy of Bloodworth Island’s western edge. Technology brought the measurement of war down to mere inches. Louis closed his eyes. He was always sending men to face death.
Ninety seconds.
* * * *
Bloodworth Island
Peter dropped to a hover twenty feet above the waves. The bomb’s clock had just flipped below the final sixty seconds. The two cops stood awkwardly and tugged at the door. It refused to move because they did not understand how to work the latch. Peter shouted something and somehow toggled the latch with his outstretched fingers.
Forty seconds.
Fear reached towards Peter from its shadowy depths and said mockingly,You’re going to die!
The two cops heaved the bomb and case over the side of the JetRanger. It tumbled, separating from its carrying case and banging against the skids. The naked bomb hit the water causing the warhead to bounce against the trigger mechanism and one of the precise triangular pieces broke loose deforming the soccer-ball-style envelope surrounding the plutonium warhead.
Twenty-five seconds.
Peter jerked the yoke and headed for the island. He kept the JetRanger low and flat along the water. Land was more than twenty-five seconds away.
“The bomb is away!” he reported quickly. The engine sputtered ominously. He shouted into the intercom system. “Strap in, we‘re going in hard and fast.”
The airframe was starting to shake due to fuel starvation. He guessed he was five hundred yards off shore.
Ten seconds.
The airspeed indicator was dropping. Peter’s stomach knotted, thinking about the vile thing sinking towards the bottom behind them. Sweat poured down his face and fear laughed in his ears.Please God!
Abruptly the sea erupted behind them. It seemed early. The seawater leaking through the connectors caused the bomb to detonate four seconds prematurely. A white-hot water spout rocketed upwards from the waves. Had the trigger maintained its form, the explosion would have been in the three-kiloton range. Instead, the bomb fizzled and produced a 0.2-kiloton blast and the effects were further dampened by the sea. While the warhead compressed in ten millionth of a second, it did not compress evenly and the precision needed for nuclear pyrotechnics was lost. Many fish died in the blast, but the extraordinary effects still ravaging central Connecticut were spared off Bloodworth Island.
Regardless, the JetRanger was still too close.
The JetRanger’s instruments went crazy, then burned themselves out as the electron-magnetic pulse wave wrecked every electronic device. An onboard computer ran almost every indicator and the computer’s brain melted down too. The yoke became sluggish in Peter’s hands. He was attempting to compensate for the change when the shock wave rippled through the air about them. Anything loose inside the cockpit exploded into a fusillade of pens, clipboards, and papers. The airframe started to shake apart and Peter thought his teeth were going to rattle out of his head.
He realized he was piloting a dead stick. Pieces of the airframe flew away from the stricken JetRanger. It seemed like it was beginning to twist and roll like a large pebble. The engines were out and the rotors spun due more to the wind rushing by them than anything else. Hot steam and hard rain battered the oblong fuselage. The canopy cracked and the JetRanger spun sideways, slamming everything hard to the left. The shoreline and its sizeable trees were coming towards them. Peter reflexively leaned back in his pilot chair to avoid the inevitable crunch. He let go of the yoke and raised his hands protectively. A scream escaped his throat as the world rushed to meet him and his head banged against the metal frame. Blood ran down into his eyes and he seemed to be enclosed in a furnace.
Zero.
* * * *
Pentagon
The red transponder dot vanished from the large screen. The men in the situation room stood silently. The dot vanished before the clock reached zero. George sighed. They heard no explosion. The computer generated screens continued to pass electrons through their circuitry. The harsh reality of hurricane force winds, thermal steam pockets, and hard radiation did not register on the main display.
“What happened?” asked Louis.
No one knew.
DSP-7 dutifully recorded the Bloodworth Island event with the same dispassionate efficiency it used to report the Westchester event. The difference this time was the system’s minders were expecting the detonation. The computers reported across their hardened links and a red circle with a slash appeared at the detonation point.
“What about the chase plane?” asked George.
“We’ve lost contact.”
Plus fifteen seconds.
* * * *
Bloodworth Island
The canopy was a tangle of jagged lines, smeared leaves, and wooden branches. The main rotor blades lay behind the airframe like curled up pieces of paper that got too close to a flame. A furrow was carved through the soft ground, wrapping the airframe in a collection of vines and greenery.
Peter found the world was upside down. He tasted blood on his lips and his left arm hung painfully above his head. He knew it was broken. His neck felt like someone had tried to twist it off, then in frustration, gave it a good yank. He started to laugh. His battered ribs protested the bubbling breaths he took. His laughter degraded into a bloody cough.
The two cops did not fare as well. One had lost his grip and was sucked out into the violent slipstream as they approached landfall. The other remained strapped in his seat. There was an ugly tree branch impaled through his chest. Death came with sudden and violent surety.
The last thing Peter thought before consciousness slipped away was:Remember the promise you made.
CHAPTER 33
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Monday, July 19, 1999
6:00 P.M. EDT
Michael Rehazi settled into the uncomfortable overstuffed chair with hard wooden arms. He flipped open the laptop on the little round table next to the Arby’s sandwich he picked up. He plugged the power supply into the wall and opened up another package pulling out a new PCMCIA modem. He discarded the supplied software and instruction manual. Instead, he fished the cable from its plastic bag and plugged the laptop into the phone line.
He clicked the icon to connect to the Internet and his email account. The speakers squealed and buzzed as he stepped into the cyberworld—Harper’s world.Netscape quickly popped up his home page as the icons materialized on the screen.
Rehazi leaned back in the chair thinking about what he would tell his masters about today’s disaster. Somehow, they had discovered the bomb and managed to prevent its detonation. The television was tuned to CNN with the sound turned down. It was the only all-news channel he could get on the limited cable package available to him. There was nothing regarding the immolation of the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, or the massive kill of the American government. There were just these boats trolling off Martha’s Vineyard looking for plane wreckage. Something was wrong, but what could have happened?
The laptop sounded a chime he did not recognize, and a bright female voice announced, “You’ve got mail!”
Startled, Rehazi stared at the blinking mail icon. Perhaps, it was nothing but a message from the ISP. Heknew it was something else.
The enveloped icon pulsed with a heartbeat. He breathed out, moved the mouse pointer, and clicked the letter.
The email list expanded in a small window on the screen. There was one entry labeled: HELLO DIRTBAG. Rehazi stared in shock at the message header. A thin, sick, stream of cold sweat dribbled down his chest.
* * * *
Pentagon
Harper answered his cell phone.
“This is Scotty, your guy just connected.”
Harper clicked the computer he had been given to use in George Carnady’s outer office. A slow, nasty smile emerged on Harper’s lips.
“Can you trace him?”
“Working on it. I should have a caller ID number in about thirty seconds. Think he’ll stay on?”
