“Short circuit. I think you’ve hit on it, sir. But firepower isn’t the answer.” Hurley bounded from his seat, a fallen champion eager for a rematch. “You don’t really fight fire with fire.”
There was no time for a concentrated effort, but in the few minutes that were available, a strategy was devised and implemented. A single fire hose was attached to the White House standpipe and unfurled onto the lawn.
To minimize the risk of shock, the members of the fire brigade manning the hose wore their rubber boots; it was no guarantee of safety but then nothing about this plan was guaranteed.
General Vaughn’s aide-de-camp, a young first lieutenant, established direct wireless contact with the chase plane that followed the lone sky raider up the Potomac, reporting on all his activities and measuring his progress. There seemed little doubt concerning his ultimate goal. The general himself was scanning the horizon with a pair of field glasses. “I see the plane.”
Hurley, who loomed over the uniformed officer like a small mountain, squinted up at the sky. He could just make out the speck that was a P-36 Hawk patrol aircraft, but his unaided eye could not discern the figure of the flying man. “Sir, may I?”
Vaughn passed the binoculars over without hesitation. He knew of no finer marksman than Hurley; if anyone could spot the approaching enemy, it was Hurricane.
The big man quickly located the plane, a low-slung fighter with a single radial engine and stubby wings. The distant pilot was turning wide circles in the sky, desperately trying to keep his plane from stalling as he tracked the much slower target. Hurley followed him through a series of spirals, then lowered his field of view to a point roughly at the center of the circle. There, more than a thousand feet below the Hawk, still out over the river, was a black shape that might have simply been a soaring bird.
“Got him,” Hurley announced. “He’s a few minutes out.”
“Do you know the range of his weapon?”
“No, but it’s a safe bet that he can shoot lightning a lot further than we can pump water.”
“Let’s see if we can’t bring him down a little before he gets here.”
“Tell your man to be careful. Those lightning bolts weren’t lethal down here, but up there… Well, if the pilot gets knocked out or his engine catches fire, he’ll be done for.”
Vaughn nodded crisply, and relayed his instructions to the pilot of the P-36. The plane immediately executed a rolling loop and drew up behind the lone raider. Hurley couldn’t tell, given the distance, if the flier was aware of the chase plane; if not, he was about to get the surprise of his life.
The plane made a dive-bombing run at the flier, swooping down like a hunting raptor from more than a thousand feet. The pilot pulled up well short of a collision, but the effect was nonetheless quite dramatic. The sky raider seemed unaware until, at the very last second, he lurched in mid-air and then dropped almost straight down. The evasive maneuver abruptly took him below the horizon created by the structures of the capital city, but Hurley reckoned the fellow was now over land and only about a minute away.
“It’s working,” Vaughn announced, relaying the pilot’s radio transmissions. “He’s down to about two hundred feet. One more pass should put him right where we want him.”
Hurricane nodded grimly and kept the glasses trained on the fighter plane. The pilot was playing a dangerous game now; to corral the flying villain into the range of the makeshift water cannon, he would have to walk the tightrope between overhauling his quarry and dropping out of the sky. The planes that had flown two decades before, during the Great War, would have had an easier time matching the pace of the flying attackers, but today’s monoplanes were built for speed; they had to go fast to keep from stalling. At two hundred feet, there would be precious little time to correct any mistakes.
“Here they come! Ready on the fire hose!”
The Hawk executed a broad loop and lined up on its unseen target. Even without fixing the man in his binoculars, Hurley was able to approximate his position by the trajectory of the incoming aircraft. It was close enough now that all on the ground could hear the roar of the 840 horsepower Wright Cyclone power plant as the plane began its final dive. The Doppler effect caused the pitch of the engine’s whine to grow with its approach, punctuating the impending climax. Then, when it seemed the plane must surely crash, the pilot nosed up with full flaps, showing the belly of his aircraft to all on the ground below. It seemed almost close enough to touch.
At that same instant, the man who flew without wings burst into view directly above the garden. Hurricane was unable to focus his glasses on the man before Vaughn’s stentorian voice commanded: “Let him have it!”
Something was wrong though. Hurley had an overwhelming urge to take another look at the attacker; there was something familiar about his sun-bleached hair and the silhouette of his jaw, but it was the clothing he wore under the metallic outline of his flying pack that really caught his eye. The group that had shanghaied the President had been wearing the attire of laborers, dungarees and T-shirts, but this man was crashing the party in formal attire; he was wearing a tuxedo.
The answer came to him in a rush of understanding. “Wait!”
But his roar was drowned out by the eruption of water blasting from the hose.
CHAPTER 4
OUT OF THE FRYING PAN
The wind-up alarm clock wired to the explosive bundles spread across the barge, ticked inexorably toward a very final deadline. Whether for simplicity’s sake or simple perverse humor, the bomb maker had set the alarm to ring at twelve o’clock — Dodge immediately thought midnight, though it could have been noon — and both hands were nearly on that mark.
Dodge knew that disarming the bomb might be as simple as yanking the wires from the clock to prevent the circuit from closing, or merely resetting the alarm hand in order to postpone the terminal event, but he also knew that attempting to do so could easily cause to happen the very thing he sought to prevent. He might accidentally cross the wires in the act of removing them, or turn the alarm key the wrong direction and prematurely ring the bell. Better to let the device do what it was intended to do, and view the results from a nice, safe distance.
Escaping the blast zone was likewise easier said than done. Dodge was a strong swimmer, but drowning in the river was not the greatest threat along that path. Water was the perfect medium for transmitting the energy of an explosion, a fact well demonstrated during the Great War when Her Majesty’s destroyers had effectively neutralized the Kaiser’s U-boat menace with depth charges. A blast that, on terra firma might merely stun a bystander, would pound a swimmer’s internal organs to jelly.
There was but one avenue of escape yet Dodge was loathe to employ the flying pack. He was soaked through from his plunge into the Potomac and there was no telling what sort of reaction would occur if he activated the exoskeleton’s electric field. Nevertheless, the uncertain possibilities inherent in using the enemy’s device to save himself was preferable to any alternative, and as the clock ticked into its final seconds, he moved to clasp the belt.
His next memory was one of fire — fire burning all around, and scorching needles of pain erupting, like tiny conflagrations, throughout his body. Underlying the agony however, there was a sense of exhilaration as his cognitive abilities caught up with the tempest. The overall effect was such that, had he been able to breathe a word through his clenched jaws, he might have uttered an expletive to make a longshoreman blush.