“So there’s no way to defend against someone trying to flash-blind pilots?”
Holt shook his head. “Kat, if somebody’s really going to make a habit of this, we’re sitting ducks. Hell, even an ordinary laser could damage our eyes. It’s happened twice in Las Vegas in the past four years from nothing but show-business lasers. What if that thing you found is an antipersonnel version?”
“Antipersonnel?” Kat echoed.
“I’m an Air Force reservist,” he said, “now retired, but I… let’s just say I knew my way around the intelligence sector during my years in the saddle. I can tell you that one of the things that terrorized us in the fighter community was the prospect that one day the Russians or the Chinese or someone in the Mideast who doesn’t like us a lot would decide to develop a powerful handheld laser for the simple purpose of destroying a pilot’s eyes with one burst.”
“The Air Force studied that?”
He nodded. “For decades. For nuclear blasts, we gave B-fifty-two pilots solid gold-foil eye patches, so they’d have one good eye left if someone touched off a nuke a hundred miles ahead of the attacking bomber. But fighter pilots have to use both eyes, we don’t fly all that much by instruments, like the transports. So what happens when we can’t look without losing our eyes? Simple. We can’t see, we can’t fight.”
“Was anything developed that you know of to — to—”
“Neutralize the threat and protect the eyes? They tried. Nothing worked well enough to be foolproof. A laser or particle beam travels at the speed of light. Any shutter device or goggle device takes too long to close up. If the blast is powerful enough, it’s going to fry your retina. I mean, literally, instantly, and permanently.”
“Good grief!”
“Can you imagine the value of that to a pipsqueak nation with a pitiful air force who’s purchased a hundred or so eye-killing light weapons? They could use Cessnas to neutralize F-fifteens. Bit of an overstatement, but the point is valid.”
“Captain, did we build any? You know, we may want to stamp out biological weapons, too, but if there’s a suspicion the other side’s going to have them, we’ve got to have an even bigger, better arsenal.”
“Ridiculous cycle, isn’t it?” the captain replied evenly.
“But you didn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t need to, Kat. You just answered it yourself.”
She hesitated, smiling thinly. “What was your rank, Captain Holt?”
“In the Air Force? Brigadier general.”
“I rather thought so. Your level of knowledge sounded flag rank.”
“And you’d like to ask me more, wouldn’t you?”
She nodded. “Such as, whether there’s a stockpile somewhere of American-built antipersonnel laser guns.”
Holt smiled. “It’s too bad I can neither confirm nor deny that possibility.”
Kat felt a shiver ripple down her back, but hid it and smiled at Holt as she turned to go.
The captain caught her sleeve. “Kat? If that’s what was used against Meridian and SeaAir… in other words, if those things are being sold… you’ve got to get the word out, no matter how that impacts the economics of airline flying, and no matter where they were built.”
“Understood.”
“No, I mean it. No one’s going to want to hear it. The FAA will want to run for cover and study the threat for a year while the Air Transport Association will want to flatly deny it could happen again. Meanwhile, whatever intelligence agencies screwed up and didn’t see this coming will want to bury the whole thing while their covert-ops people move frantically to crush the organization that decided to use it this time. The public, for their part, will want to stick their heads in the sand and call the threat too technical to understand, and Congress, as usual, will sit around and convince each other that no action is needed. But if these weapons are really out of the bag now and being sold — we’ve got to ban them worldwide, just like land mines.”
Judy, the lead flight attendant, spotted Kat entering the cabin and showed her to the first-class seat next to Robert, who had been looking out the window at the last glow of sunset behind them. Kat saw the wave of recognition cross his face, leaving behind a broad smile.
“Kat! I missed you.”
She returned the smile, feeling extraordinarily good about sitting next to him, as if they’d known each other as old friends for years instead of hours. She could see Dallas sitting with Steve, and Dan seated next to Graham Tash, who had been sleeping but woke up suddenly, turning to look around at Kat.
“How’re you doing, Doctor?” she asked.
He rubbed his forehead and sighed. “Trying not to dream or think,” he said, settling back in the seat.
“How’re you holding out?” Robert asked her.
“You mean, fatigue?” Kat laughed. “I’m walking wounded, and didn’t even have to survive a crash… or see all the horrors you all witnessed at the crash site.”
She started to stand, to pull her satellite phone and a fresh battery out of her purse, but the thought of the captain’s words caused her to sit down again and turn to Robert. “We’ve got to talk. Carnegie knew something very, very vital, and we’ve got to figure out what that was. We don’t have much time.”
“I figured you’d be convinced,” he said.
“Robert, I’m convinced of something else. Regardless of what happened to that SeaAir MD-eleven, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’m sure that thing we found on the Global Express was an eyekiller. A laser, a particle-beam weapon, an exotic new ray gun… something designed to destroy eyesight. Apparently our military has been studying these things for decades, and that means we’ve been building them as well. I think some very clever bunch of cutthroats has found a new tool to use for international terrorism-for-hire, and they probably stole it from us.”
“Where are you going with this, Kat?”
“To the phone, in a second. I’ve got to report in to my boss, and we need to find out what kind of eye-killing weapons are secretly stockpiled somewhere, and have someone go check to see if there aren’t a few of them missing.”
“The ID plate on that thing did look military and American-made.”
“My point exactly.” She tried to stifle a huge yawn and inclined her head toward the aisle. “I’m going to go splash some water on my face and try to get my hair under control, but if you can stay awake, I think we’re going to need to connect up your computer to one of the sky-phones and go fishing. We’ve got to find out what your friend knew.”
He nodded. “I don’t know how we’re going to do that, but sure, I’ll be awake. I’m too exhausted to sleep, anyway. And I’ve probably crossed the threshold into social unacceptance by now.”
She chuckled, shaking her head. “You know, for someone who’s not only slept in his clothes but survived a major plane crash, a race through the jungle, and a helicopter ride with a maniac for a pilot, you look ‘mah-vellous.’”
“As long as I’m not too ripe. We all used that tiny shower on the Global Express, but I still feel grubby.”
“Well, Sir, you sure don’t look it. Call it jungle chic. I think it suits us.”
Her left hand was resting on the divider between the seats, and Robert had covered it with his right hand so gently she hadn’t noticed until she started to get up. She looked up at him with a little smile and he smiled back and squeezed.