Let the Music Play - 46. Impact

The arrival of a military tiltrotor at Dodger Stadium had not gone unnoticed. The blades had not stopped turning before phones were ringing in TV news stations across Los Angeles.

Once he’d arrived, General Bradson had been politely but firmly ordered by the NEST team leader, a Captain Stevens, to leave his cell phone, watch, and anything else electrical at the command post they’d set up at the parking lot entrance. Nothing electronic could be carried near the bomb, due to the chance that an errant radio signal could cause a detonation. This would be standard procedure for a conventional bomb, but given that they were dealing with a nuke, all precautions were followed to the letter. Wire for a field telephone was being flown in to overcome the communications problem, but it had not yet arrived.

Nodding his assent, and wishing to see the bomb with his own eyes, General Bradson made a quick call to his operations officer at Edwards, and informed him that he’d be away from his phone for about fifteen minutes.

Still entangled, Dimitri and Brandon fell a dozen feet before crashing onto the flattened top of a rocky spire, the force of the impact knocking the breath from them both. Ignoring both Brandon and the pain for the moment, Dimitri glanced around, spotting his nuclear trigger laying inches from the edge, just a few feet from his head.

Dimitri elbowed Brandon hard in the jaw and scrambled to his feet, lunging for the trigger. Brandon, half dazed from the fall and the blow, grabbed Dimitri’s ankle, sending him sprawling, almost falling over the edge.

Brandon lurched into a crouching stance. With a snarl, Dimitri drew his knife as he scrambled to his feet, moving just a little more cautiously than he normally would thanks to the dizzying heights, and lunged for Brandon’s throat. Stepping inside the thrust, Brandon landed a hard right cross on Dimitri’s jaw.

Staggering backwards, Dimitri came to a halt just inches from the edge. Looking down, past his right arm; Dimitri’s blood ran cold at the sight of two hundred feet of nothing separating him from the canyon floor below. Driven by both fear and rage, Dimitri charged Brandon with a roar, his blade leading the way.

Again Brandon dodged the attack, backpedaling nearly to the opposite edge of the rocky plateau. Dimitri lunged again with a jab aimed at Brandon’s abdomen. Using his left hand, Brandon knocked Dimitri’s arm down and to the outside, locking on tight to his wrist. Dimitri, with his knife hand trapped, concentrated on pulling back, completely missing Brandon’s follow-through as Brandon pivoted, swinging his right leg up, twisting slightly sideways to land a kick squarely in Dimitri’s crotch.

Stunned by the pain quickly percolating upwards from his groin and confused by the fast moves of someone he’d assumed he would eviscerate with ease, Dimitri stumbled backwards as his knife fell from his grasp, glinting in the sunlight as it fell with a clatter and bounced over the edge of the abyss.

Dimitri’s questing eye fell again on the nuclear trigger as Brandon spun around in a full circle, his next flying kick landing in the center of Dimitri’s chest.

Eric had heard the muffled thud when Brandon and Dimitri landed, though he was unable to see them due to the intervening rocky fin. Desperate to take a shot at Dimitri and also to see if he could help Brandon, Eric leaped down to the ledge Dimitri had been on prior to Brandon’s tackle. Recovering his balance after nearly falling to his death, Eric raised his shotgun, but found his shot blocked by Brandon.

Driven by the force of the kick, Dimitri flew over the edge, his eyes wide with horror, a scream forming in his throat as his momentum twisted him in the air and he gained a view of the fast-approaching rocks two hundred feet below. Mixed with the terror was the fleeting realization that he had utterly failed. There wasn’t time for more.

Brandon’s fear of heights re-asserted itself as he dropped to a crouch, his hands seeking the rock for support but never taking his eyes off his falling opponent. “Happy landings,” Brandon muttered, a moment before the sickening thud of Dimitri’s fatal impact with the jagged rocks echoed off the canyon walls.

Feeling dizzy from the heights, Brandon flattened himself against the rock, feeling the rough stone against his bare chest. He looked down at Dimitri, and saw his broken body jerking in abating spasms, surrounded by a growing pool of blood. Correctly assuming that Dimitri was dead, Brandon inched back from the edge. Seeing the nuclear trigger a few feet to his side, Brandon reached out and picked it up. He could see that the screen was still on, and not wanting to take any chances he snapped the battery out, and then slid both the battery and the trigger into his pocket. He then slipped his fingers into a crack in the rock. Gripping as best he could, not trusting his balance due to his bruised and battered condition, he closed his eyes tight and tried to shut out the dizzying heights.

Eric’s voice from above and behind Brandon called out, “Are you okay?”

“I’m all right, I think… but I don’t want to move. I don’t like heights.” Brandon replied, remaining face down, not wanting to even turn his head.

Eric had watched Dimitri slam into the rocks and had no doubt that he was dead, and as the realization dawned that it was over, his hands began to shake as the adrenalin rush wore off. Relieved, Eric yelled back, “We’ll get you down. Stay put.”

Glancing back at Jim, who had finally clawed his way out of the ventilation shaft and was peering down from the ledge above, Eric then leaned out to look around the enclosing fins of rock, realizing that the climb back to safety would be perilous at best, fatal at worst, due to having no idea which way to go. Snapping open his cell phone, he saw that he had no signal. “Fuck, we’re stuck,” he muttered.

Sitting down to let his legs dangle over the drop-off, Eric called down to Brandon, “Hey bro, I can’t get a signal here. See if you can. We’ve got to let everyone know we’re okay and get them to send help.”

It took a considerable act of will, but Brandon managed to let go of the rock with one hand and fished for his phone, only to find it missing. Remembering where it was, Brandon forced himself to turn partially over and faced Eric to say, “Chase has it. Toss me yours.”

After a fumbling catch, Brandon flipped open the phone. Seeing that he had a signal, Brandon dialed his own phone’s number. Brody answered and Brandon said, “We got the guy with the trigger, but we’re stuck on a cliff, somewhere to the north of you. Other than that, we’re okay.”

Allowing himself a sigh of relief first, Brody said, “We saw somebody fall but we didn’t know who it was. We can’t see him from here, we only got a glimpse. Glad to hear you guys are okay. We’ve had no luck on getting anyone to listen to us about the cell system, but the sheriff’s department has people on the way, including a medical team. Stay put, we’ll get help to you.”

Five minutes later, Brandon flinched as a dusty hand came over the edge a few feet from his nose. For a chilling moment, he thought Dimitri had somehow survived, but Wilde’s concerned face popping into view evoked a sigh of relief.

Unwilling to relinquish his grip on the rock and making no attempt to move, Brandon said, “I’m sure glad it’s you. I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see anyone.” Remembering what had happened during the grenade attacks and fearing the worst. “How’s Steve?” Brandon asked, as Wilde scrambled onto the flat rock and crouched at Brandon’s side.

“He’s hurt, but not bad,” Wilde replied as he looked at Brandon’s unmoving form. Wilde was concerned at first, but after giving Brandon a fast once-over decided that the scrapes, bruises, and bullet burns were probably superficial. “The grenade blew him over the edge and he tumbled down the mine tailings. I managed to grab him as he passed by. He’s bruised and cut up from the fall, and he’s got a little shard of rock sticking out of his throat. I got him back to the bikes. I think he’s doing okay. Now what about you, can you move?”

“Can I, or will I?” Brandon asked, not budging an inch. “I’m not hurt bad, but I don’t want to move. I don’t like heights.”

Smiling for the first time since he became aware of the attack, Wilde said, “You might feel kinda silly if you stay put. It’s only about ten feet down to where the back of this spire joins the mountain, and it’s an easy climb. From there, there are plenty of handholds until you traverse to the pathway.”

Moving only from the neck up, Brandon shook his head and said, “No way. I’m not budging. I don’t care if it’s ten inches, that’s too high for me right now. I’ll wait for the rescue team and as many safety harnesses as they can rig. I’m pretty sore and banged up.”

Wilde gave Brandon a shrug and a chuckle. “That’ll work, but if it was me I’d feel safer climbing it instead of dangling from a helicopter by a rope.”

Brandon shuddered and gripped the rock harder. “You think they’d do that?”

“That would be my guess. Easiest way to get you out of here that I can see.”

On the ledge above, Eric waved to Wilde as Zeke scrambled up to join Eric and Jim.

Zeke had scouted a route, and reported that all they had to do was climb down to the ledge below, work their way around a fin of rock, and they would then be on a narrow shelf which gave an easy way back towards the main mineshaft. Jim took a little convincing, but within a few minutes, Zeke took the lead and Eric brought up the rear as they clambered over towards the shelf.

Brandon watched as they passed by, just fifteen feet away. Turning his head, he asked Wilde, “You’re sure it’s an easy climb? I really don’t like heights.”

Wilde walked to the upslope edge and checked again before replying, “You climb down ten feet, take the saddle back to the mountainside, which is less than ten feet, then climb up a defile for maybe fifteen feet, and you’re on the shelf. I can help you down, then I’ll stay behind you as you climb.”

Taking a deep breath, and ignoring his churning stomach, Brandon pried his fingers from their handholds, turned around, and crawled to the drop he’d have to descend. Seeing that it wasn’t quite as bad as he’d feared, and trying not to look at the plunging drops below the saddle, he glanced sideways, seeing similar protrusions from the mountainside. Only then did he realize that his landing on the rock had been a miracle; a few feet in any direction and he’d have plunged to his death. Wanting to be on level ground again, Brandon said, “Okay, I’ll try. You go first.”

Wilde scrambled past Brandon, swung himself over the edge, and dropped to the saddle of rock ten feet below. As he helped Brandon down, Wilde asked, “How the hell did you get up there, anyway?”

Silently cursing Wilde’s timing for bringing up that particular memory during the climb, Brandon reached the saddle and dropped to all fours, inching along the rock on hands and knees as Wilde casually walked backwards, a couple of feet ahead. As he crawled, Brandon told Wilde how he and Dimitri had ended up on the flat-toped column, and Brandon finished the story by saying, “I was damn lucky, I had no idea it was there when I tackled him, I couldn’t see it from where I was.”

After whistling softly, Wilde shook his head as he replied, “Whoa. Not a place I’d want to fight, but sounds to me like you just saved a few million lives.”

As he climbed up the defile with Wilde behind him, Brandon mumbled, “Right now, I just want to get back to Chase, then if I never see so much as a molehill again, it’ll be too soon. You, Steve and Zeke do this climbing stuff for fun, but man, you couldn’t pay me enough to even watch, not after today.”

In Los Angeles, General Bradson stared at the bomb from a dozen feet away, wondering where the others were planted. He knew that he dared not act until the others had been found. The risk was too great; if the bomb had some means of active communication and suddenly went offline, there was too great a chance that a bomb could be detonated as a warning to leave the others alone. The chatter of helicopter blades interrupted his thoughts, and he glanced skyward to see a news chopper taking station above the stadium. The Captain said, “General, those newsies have a lot of high-powered broadcasting gear on those birds. We need to get them out of here, fast.”

A second chopper arrived from the west, and General Bradson spotted two more approaching. The General dashed for the truck that had carried him from the main staging point.

Clambering out of the truck at the staging point just outside the stadium gates, General Bradson yelled at his operations officer, “Get on the phone to air traffic control, and get those damn news helicopters the hell out of here. I want them on the ground. If they don’t comply immediately, send the Osprey up after ‘em. Fire some fifty caliber rounds across their noses if they don’t move, but get them the hell out of here, no matter what it takes. Shoot ‘em down if you have to.” The danger of their radio emissions was not the General’s only objection to the news helicopters; he knew that a mass panic would ensue if anyone figured out what was going on at Chavez ravine.

Reunited with his phone, General Bradson found an unexpected, yet welcome, message waiting. The NSA – the National Security Agency, the nation’s largest intelligence organization – had completed its analysis of the photos taken during the bomb’s construction, which purported to show ten devices. What they’d found was that the steel bombcases themselves had distinctive and discernible grain structures. That had allowed the NSA to deduce that the photos were staged, and actually showed just three unique bombcases during various stages of the warhead assembly process. That detail had confirmed the suspicion raised the previous day by news from Russia via a signals intercept; the Russians had discovered a thirty kilogram MUF – Material Unaccounted For – at one of their Siberian weapons facilities. That facility was known, thanks to an intercept two years before, to have neutron attenuation problems in its reactor which resulted in a high percentage of PU-240 in the plutonium it produced. Analysis of the bomb’s fallout had revealed a high degree of PU-240 along with a guesstimate of ten kilograms of plutonium per bomb, filling in the final piece of the puzzle; there were only three bombs. The General welcomed the news, it meant they had only one more to find.

One other message waited; it was from Chase Carlisle. The General was about to read it when he received a call from New York.

In New York, after countless searches of Madison Square Garden and fruitlessly combing the records, one of the NEST team members had thought to check video surveillance cameras in the area. It had taken a day to round up the tapes from Madison Square Garden and some surrounding areas. The tapes from Penn Station had been added as an afterthought, just in case The Scar ­– they had his California Driver’s License photo, thanks to running the plates on his SUV – had passed through. The tapes from the loading bay area were the first to be reviewed due to Eric’s reported sighting of a bomb. It took under twenty minutes, but soon they had The Scar on screen. Twenty minutes after that, and after a frantic review of the Penn Station tapes, the NEST team made its way into Penn Station. Orders were passed to the local police to clear the area, and once the station was clear, the NEST team began its careful work. A tiny hole was drilled in the mortar The Scar had used to set the granite panel, and soon they were looking at an image of the bomb on a closed-circuit camera.

Major Glaspie, the NEST team leader in New York, had a problem. Phoning General Bradson, Major Glaspie activated a scrambler. “Sir, we believe we’ve located the device. It’s in Penn station, under a staircase and behind some granite. We don’t know what sort of anti-tamper devices it contains, so we can’t use any form of remote-sensing to determine its internal configuration. If it has a sensor to detect x-rays, it could detonate. Same for any other form of remote sensing devices. It could also have a photo-sensor, so just opening up the area it’s in will have to be done in near total darkness. We can’t move it either; it might contain a temblor switch,” the Major said, referring to a type of switch that detects motion or movement.

Now that he had information which indicated that there were only two bombs, both of which were attended by NEST teams, the general knew that the equation had changed; he could now act. With that in mind, he asked, “Cut to the chase, Major. Can you disarm the thing or not?”

Taking a deep breath, the Major replied, “Probably, sir, if we proceed with great care. However, whoever built these things knows a lot about engineering, so I have to assume it has extensive and sophisticated anti-tamper protection. Best guess, sir, we have a two out of three chance of succeeding, if luck is on our side.”

The General, who knew a little about nuclear design, also knew there was no way that he, or anyone, could risk the existence of New York on such odds. Not certain of his reasoning, he asked, “Do you have an anti-tank missile or any kind of shaped charge? Am I correct in assuming that if you distort the explosives before the bomb can fire, we won’t have a nuclear blast?”

“Yes, sir. We are so equipped; we have demolition charges that will slice right through the bomb case, and yes sir, you are correct, that would negate the chance for a fission explosion. However, the bomb’s conventional explosives will likely detonate, dispersing the plutonium. It would be what the press calls a dirty bomb. The entire station and the arena above it, at least, will be massively contaminated with plutonium. We could be looking at a contamination of several city blocks.”

Given that there was no way to defuse the bomb without risking detonation, and not knowing how it could be detonated, General Bradson faced a horrible choice; cause the nuclear contamination of several city blocks, or risk the entire city and millions of lives. He considered an evacuation order, but immediately dismissed the idea; it would take days to evacuate, time he felt sure they did not have. He knew that at any second, New York or Los Angeles, or both, could face the same fate as Toowoomba. A complicating factor was the risk that an attempt to isolate the bomb could in itself trigger the disaster. Procedure demanded that he send the decision on up the ladder, all the way to the White House.

Knowing that, he also knew that the politicians and staffers, unfamiliar with the workings of a nuclear device, could well make the wrong decision. At best, they would take hours, hours that could prove fatal for millions. The General knew that there was really only one decision he could make. His first loyalty was to his country, and in this case, that meant the millions of innocent lives at stake. Not caring that it would cost him his career, he gave the only order his conscience would permit. “Major Glaspie, set up those demolition charges and clear the area. Kill that nuke just as soon as you can. Better to lose a few blocks than the city and everyone in it.” The field telephone to the bomb site at Dodger Stadium having become operational just moments before, the General proceeded to give identical instructions to Captain Stevens, the NEST team leader there.

Brandon gave Chase a hug, and then sat down in the dust beside him. Their eyes met, and Brandon lost himself in Chase’s blue eyes for a long moment, marveling at the fact that they were both still alive. Brandon then glanced over at Steve, who also sat, propped up against the mountain rocks, with Wilde’s bloodstained shirt around his neck. Steve, not wanting to move his head, acknowledged Brandon with a wan smile.

Jim joined them, and Brandon fished the damaged nuclear trigger from his pocket. “This could have destroyed millions of people, and he tried to use it,” Brandon said, staring at the damaged device.

Taking a look for himself, Jim reminded Brandon, “You better call that General again. I’m sure he’d like to know about what happened here.”

Chase nodded weakly and Eric added, “Jerry must have a trigger, too. He could still fry L.A. and New York.”

Snapping open his cell phone, Brandon dialed the number he’d been given for Edwards Air Force Base. As soon as the line picked up, he said, “I need to talk to General Bradson. It’s urgent.”

The voice on the other end of the line replied in a businesslike manner, “Please leave your name and number, and I’ll pass your request on to the General’s staff.”

“There’s no time for that. This is about the bombs, the nuclear bombs. I know how they’re triggered. In fact, I have a triggering device in my hand. Tell the General that! He’ll want to speak with me right away.”

After several seconds, another voice came on the line, one Brandon recognized as the General’s. Brandon summed up everything that had occurred as quickly as he could, and finished by saying, “Sir, the man who tried to kill us had a trigger that looks like a cell phone. The battery is out and the trigger is a little banged up, but I can see inside the case and it sure looks like a cell phone to me.”

Deciding to take a chance and believe Brandon, the General dropped the phone and picked up his other line, yelling at the Major in New York, “Don’t fire that charge! Repeat, abort the demolition. We have reason to believe that the bomb is radio-detonated and likely in the ultra-high-frequency range because it appears to use cellular communications. Try to get the plug pulled on any cell towers or relays in your area; shoot ‘em out if you have to. I’ll work on it from this end. If you can jam or shield on those frequencies, do so.” The General then repeated the same message to the team at Dodger Stadium.

Major Glaspie paced in the evacuated subway station, eyeing the demolition charges being attached to the bombcase, as he thought for a few seconds before replying, “Sir, I need to advise against any jamming. That can be detected and we still have no idea what anti-tamper mechanisms might be in play. It could detect a jamming signal and detonate. It might also detect a loss of signal from the cell towers and detonate. Pull the plug at the switchboards, not the towers; that way the towers won’t go dead but no calls will get through. As for the bomb, we assume it is a capacitance-discharge system for the ignition sequence, and if so we’d likely pick that up on the passive electrical sensors and have time to trigger the demolition charges. However, if it’s a straight discharge system from high-capacity batteries, there would be no warning. We need information that we do not yet have.”

Hope, looming large yet snatched from his grasp, fled from the General as he amended his orders regarding the cell system shut-down, and then weighed his options. They needed information from inside the bombcase. Hoping against hope, he picked up his other phone and asked Brandon, “What’s the condition of the man who had the trigger?”

“He’s dead, sir. He’s somebody we saw in Australia with Jerry. I had to kill him; he was trying to trigger the bombs,” Brandon replied, looking down the mountain at Dimitri’s shattered body.

With that bit of news, General Bradson felt a chill run up his spine; he had no idea they’d come so close to disaster. The news steeled him to act, because somewhere out there, he knew, was Jerry Clump, who would certainly have a trigger. If he learned that the bombs had been uncovered.... Lifting his field phone, he asked the Captain in charge of the Los Angeles NEST team, “What’s the status on the demolition charges, and the scene?”

The young Captain, his palms slick with sweat, replied, “The charges are in place and the Chavez Ravine area has been evacuated.”

General Bradson had to choose; a dirty bomb in Los Angeles or in New York. The fact that Chavez Ravine is a little more isolated than Penn Station gave him only one option, so he took a deep breath and said, “Pull back to a safe distance upwind and detonate immediately.”

Captain Stevens ordered everyone out, and the convoy of vehicles raced out of the parking lot before turning west.

From a half a mile away, Captain Stevens reconfirmed his orders with the General in person, and then pressed a button on a radio detonator.

The signal triggered the two shaped charges, which resembled nothing so much as coffee cans, that had been attached with epoxy and tamped into place with sandbags against the bombcase. They both fired, sending jets of superheated metal lancing through the steel. Several of the anti-tamper wires were cut, and the bomb’s control unit began to charge the capacitors as the nuclear detonation sequence began.

The bomb’s firing circuit was too slow by several orders of magnitude. Before the relay to the capacitors could open and begin to charge them, the jet of molten metal from the first shaped charge sliced into the grey high explosives of the implosion shell. Through good luck and little else, the jet struck between two of the detonators, missing both by over four inches. The shockwave from the shaped charge, having spent much of its energy on the bombcase and inner shielding, lacked the concussive power to cause a detonation of the high explosives, and merely distorted them on that side of the sphere. Had a detonator been hit, it would have triggered the high explosive shell, but from a single point. The asymmetrical detonation would have scattered the plutonium but could not have triggered a nuclear blast.

The second demolition charge, placed a foot to the right, spent its focused fury on the bombcase and the heavy layers of lithium batteries, driving some of them into the explosive shell, but not hard enough to trigger a detonator or the high explosive itself.

The capacitors, robbed of their power source, could not charge. The nuclear core was largely unaffected, though it had been rendered harmless. All that had been required was a slight distortion of the high explosive shell, and that had been accomplished by both demolition charges.

Captain Stevens floored his van, racing back to the bomb site as fast as he could. He knew, from the lack of a secondary explosion, that the inner workings of the bomb would still be discernible.

Peering into the bomb with the aid of a fiber-optic camera, he was able to see much of its structure. What drew his attention was the control box. He thanked the fates that it was still intact, and with difficulty reached in through the hand-sized holes in the bombcase to remove the control circuit’s cover.

It took under ten minutes, and then the captain was able to report his findings to an anxious General Bradson. “Sir, the control circuit is quite simple. It apparently monitors cellular frequencies using a crystal-based receiver. There is only one anti-tamper device that I can detect; a net of wires inside the bomb case. Cutting any of those would have caused detonation. However, I can see a large bank of capacitors; this is definitely a capacitance-discharge system. If the one in New York is of the same design, which I consider likely, there should be at least a three-second warning from our passive electrical sensors.”

Breathing a sigh of relief, General Bradson asked, “Are you certain that we can move the New York bomb safely?”

Captain Stevens paused to consider his reply. Reaching his decision, he said, “Probably, sir, but that assumes they are of identical design, including the anti-tamper system. I consider it very probable that the bomb itself is of similar design, but we cannot know for certain regarding the anti-tamper mechanisms. Given the thickness of the bombcase, I have a high degree of confidence that a high-caliber rifle firing an armor-piercing bullet would penetrate to the explosive shell and distort it enough to make a symmetrical implosion and fission reaction impossible were the bomb to fire. Given the spacing on the detonators, there would only be about a one in ten chance that the bullet would strike one and trigger the explosives. Even were it to do so, it would not trigger a fission explosion. My recommendation, sir, is to shoot the bomb before attempting to move it, otherwise a temblor switch could ruin everyone’s day.”

Nodding, and finding the odds to be good under the circumstances, General Bradson asked the Major in New York. “Did you copy that? Shoot that bomb, make sure the cell system is down and also jam on every cellular frequency, then move that sucker out of there. Keep the demolition charges attached and monitor for any charging of the capacitors. Fire the charges at the first hint of trouble, just in case the bullet doesn’t sufficiently distort the explosive shell. Put the bomb on a boat and send it well out to sea before attempting to disarm it.”

Thirty seconds later, the New York cellular system went dark, and hundreds of thousands of phone calls ended abruptly. That was the first overt sign the public had that something strange was going on. Here too, the press did not fail to take notice, and almost immediately discovered that the outage was intentional and had been ordered by the federal authorities. That led to other questions. The DEFCON 1 alert had become a barely kept secret, partially dismissed by the media as a lower alert in response to the nuclear attack in Australia, but it’s oft said that the chances of keeping a secret are inversely proportional to the number of people who know it, and a great many knew of the nuclear threat to America. A few had let word slip out, in the form of warnings to relatives, the need to show their own importance, or a plethora of other reasons. What mattered, though, was that some in the press were starting to put the story together, and the phone outage in New York kicked them into high gear. Some of them were even clever enough to find out that some of the vehicles in the closed-off Penn Station area belonged to a NEST team. The nuclear secret was out.

Inside Penn Station, Major Glaspie stared at the monitor feed from the passive electrical sensors, and with his finger hovering over the button which would trigger the demolition charges, and not incidentally kill both himself and the one other member of his team still close to the bomb. Taking a deep breath, he gave a terse order. “Fire!”

A sergeant, the most junior member of the NEST team, raised a 30-06 rifle, and from a dozen feet away fired a round into the bombcase. The bullet, traveling at over twenty-six hundred feet per second, slammed into the steel casing, punching through it and then the cobalt layer, losing much of its velocity before burrowing into the high-explosive sphere, barely missing a detonator.

The news of a possible nuclear threat to the city hit the wire services while the bomb itself was being driven through the streets of New York, covered by a tarp and surrounded by several powerful radio jammers. The initial government reaction to the news was ‘no comment’ which merely confirmed the reports and added to the growing media frenzy.

Once the bomb had passed under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, bound for the open sea on a harbor fireboat – the NEST team had appropriated the first ship at hand - the United States Department of the Treasury went into action. In preparation for this moment, they had traced the electronic transfers of funds from The Scar’s Swiss account. In concert with the State Department, heavy pressure was applied to the half-dozen governments which hosted the banks to which The Scar had distributed his newfound billions. In some cases, securing prompt action required furious and decidedly undiplomatic threats from the State Department, and the accounts, scatted throughout offshore-banking havens around the world, were soon frozen, including the accounts The Scar had created to hand out to his Paraguayan hirelings. Once that had been accomplished, the news of success was relayed to the Paraguayan government.

The one thing the State Department did not and could not know was; had their success come in time? The assessment of the CIA analysts was as usual contradictory, with several analysts offering conflicting opinions. The main cause for concern was that the bribed Paraguayan military officers, though their bribes were now worthless, would have little choice but to back The Scar’s play to the end. The reasoning was simple; now that they were compromised, the officers would have much to fear from their government, were it to survive. If The Scar was successful, the only option would be war, a war for which preparations were already well underway.

© 2008 C James

Please let me know what you think; good, bad, or indifferent.

Please give me feedback, and please don’t be shy if you want to criticize! The feedback thread for this story is in my Forum. Please stop by and say "Hi!"

Many thanks to my editor EMoe for editing and for his support, encouragement, beta reading, and suggestions.

Thanks also to Shadowgod, for beta reading, support and advice, and for putting up with me.

A big "thank you" to to Bondwriter for final Zeta-reading and advice, and to Captain Rick for Beta-reading and advice.

Special thanks to Graeme, for beta-reading and advice.

Any remaining errors are mine alone.