“And you’d really be okay with me going?”
“As your husband and the father of your child, not so much. As your commander, I am more sanguine about it. You are a trained operative, you can take care of yourself, and the level of danger is very low.”
“And leave my husband with a toddler?”
“I have Guru to help. And you’ve been griping about being cooped up in the house or office, worried that you might turn into a woman who talks about baby poop at social gatherings. Go. Take a couple days, lose a few dollars of the government’s money in the slot machines, get some midwinter sun — properly skinblocked, of course.”
She smiled. “Okay. I’ll do it. Thanks, Alex.”
“We live to serve. Guess I better give John Howard a call.”
“You’re sending him, too?”
“No, but he might want to start thinking about ways to sneak onto a ship in the middle of the ocean.”
In the lowest hold behind locked and guarded doors were the EMP bombs. They wore wooden frames, made from two-by-four fir boards, and sat on big pallets, also made of wood. They smelled faintly of something spicy, and that and a seawater-and-oil odor drifted about in the damp hold. Santos knew vaguely how they worked, these devices, but they were not his thing.
He had made the mistake of asking. The explosives expert practically peed himself as he talked happily about overlapping radiation pattern lobes and capacitors, coaxial this and coaxial that, of hardened components and planes of radiation.
Santos listened with half an ear, nodded, and murmured from time to time, so that the bomb man believed, perhaps, that he had some idea of what the man was talking about.
“We’re talking fifteen, twenty megajoules in ten-hundredths of a microsecond,” the man said, his face ecstatic with pleasure at having an audience.
The man pointed at the nearest bomb, which looked to Santos like nothing so much as a torpedo in an old submarine movie. A little smaller and thinner, maybe. More pointed.
“This particular model uses PBX-9501. The armature is surrounded by a coil of heavy-gauge aluminum wire, that’s the FCG stator. The winding splits into halves, to increase induction. It’s cased in a heavy block of tightly wound Kevlar and carbon fiber, so it doesn’t blow apart before it generates the field—”
A bomb that didn’t blow things up. How odd.
Well, yes, it did explode and destroy itself, but its primary purpose was to fry sensitive components with a powerful electromagnetic pulse generated by the explosion. Very complicated. It seemed easier to him just to drop a blockbuster on the target and take it all out, but apparently magnetic radiation could go through concrete better than explosives, and besides, they didn’t want to lose the infrastructure altogether, they would need it themselves later.
Like a biological weapon that killed people, but left the buildings standing, an EMP bomb was designed to kill computers, but allow the people to remain. A bloodless weapon.
“Not as good as the Vircators,” the bomb man continued, “which are electron beam/anode devices that will vibrate at microwave frequencies. They can get forty gigs out of this design in the lab, but they are heavy and much more complicated—”
It was all just so much useless technical babble to Santos, who cared only that these giant finned silver turds would blow up when and where they were supposed to blow up, and do the job they were intended to do.
These looked big and heavy, but the bomb man had assured him they could be easily transported by common aircraft. Even though they had come via supply ship, they could, in fact, be carried on one of the big passenger helicopters, no problem. Each one only weighed as much as, say, four or five big men, and on a craft that could carry thirty or forty people, half a dozen of these devices would ride quite nicely.
The bomb man started off on some new techno-rant, but Santos waved him quiet. “Yes, I understand,” he said, lying through his smile. “I need merely be certain you understand where and when they must be delivered.”
“Oh, yes, I know.”
“Good. Attend to that. I will check back with you as we go.”
Santos strode away, his footsteps upon the steel grating echoing slightly in the warm, dank hold. You’d think it would be cooler down here, right next to the water and all, but it was not.
Timing on all this would be critical. His part was easy enough to accomplish, but a failure on the parts of others could be fatal to the mission. They had only a week, and everything must be in place and synchronized exactly by then. It was not much time when you had to deploy men, transfer bombs, and make certain you know exactly where and how to strike each target. But, it was what it was, and he was happier to be going into the field than sitting around waiting.
Moving was better than waiting, almost always. Once you got moving, to hesitate at the wrong moment, to look away from the goal, that could get you killed. Yes, you had to plan in advance, know your tactics so that you did not make a stupid mistake, but once you started rolling, hesitation was a killer. The man who blinked first lost. And that would not be him.
26
It was raining hard. There was a tropical storm offshore, maybe a hurricane, still far enough away so it wasn’t any real danger to the state yet, but close enough to bring lots of rain and choppy seas in the Gulf. Yet, there Gridley came, in an old-fashioned wooden shrimping boat, arrogant as always, secure in the knowledge that he was invincible.
Lack of confidence had never been one of Jay’s problems.
Keller, wearing a black slicker and hiding in a mangrove tangle at the edge of the estuary, with a scoped 30–30 Winchester deer rifle, watched Gridley maneuver the boat through the shallow water as he headed for the Gulf, checking for roots or half-submerged logs he might hit with the boat’s propeller. Or did they call them “screws” on boats this size?
Once again, the scenario was over the top, much more than necessary to troll for the kind of information Jay wanted. The man never let one simple vision serve when he could do nine visions complicated. And even the public scenarios he chose were major sensory sims, like that stupid climb up Mount Fuji. Please.
Keller grinned at that memory. That had shaken old Jay up some, when he’d gone over in persona and sat down right next to him. Old Jay hadn’t expected that.
When the boat got within range, Keller laid the rifle’s forestock on a gnarl of root and aimed. The rain slashed down hard, the wind blew, and the scope was wet and blurry. The trawler was bouncing up and down on the rough water, and enough of it was sloshing up through the mangrove roots to keep Keller soaked, despite the raincoat. It wasn’t an easy shot.
He managed to put the first round into the wheelhouse side window, shattering it, but missing Jay by a good foot. He worked the bolt and fired again, aiming at the hull just below the normal waterline when the boat came up on a wave. He ejected the empty shell and chambered a third round, which he fired at the life preserver hung next to the wheelhouse. Must have missed that completely, he didn’t see it hit.
The boat chugged on, no sign of Jay, who must be ducked down inside the wheelhouse, wondering what the hell was going on.
Enough. He had other business to which he needed to attend. This was fun, pulling Gridley’s chain, but Omega was coming, and they had less than a week to get ready. Not nearly enough time. He was going to have to let this go. Too bad.