"If they don't show within ten minutes, all three of us are getting in that truck and heading south," I told Tabitha and Jason.
Then a jet silently passed into view from behind a small hill. A few seconds later we could hear it. It came straight for the clearing at the guard shack.
"That's a Harrier Jump Jet," Tabitha exclaimed.
"Doesn't look like any helicopter I have ever seen," I replied.
"Yeah, I like Harriers. The VTOL capability makes them very useful like a helicopter, but still as effective as a fighter jet. Just check out how it lands in as small a space as a chopper can." Tabitha watched in approval of the pilot's skill.
The jet landed in a small clearing and two men crawled down from it. One of them was carrying a small duffle bag. The pilot confronted Tabitha.
"You Colonel Ames?"
"That's right, Captain. I thought I asked for a helicopter."
"Sorry ma'am. All the helicopters were ordered out when the tornadoes came through. There are none within twenty minutes of here. This Jump Jet came in just after the storms. We were fortunate to get it. It is a real mess out there." He pointed to the southeast.
The other man handed me a flight suit, a pair of socks, and a pair of combat boots. Then he handed the duffle bag to Tabitha, after he saluted her of course. Tabitha looked around and then stepped behind the truck.
"Gentlemen, please look the other way. Anson, get dressed quick."
I was still trying to tie my boots when Tabitha stepped out from behind the truck.
"Captain, I'll take your gear. Dr. Clemons will take the lieutenant's. Move it!" The two of them moved it.
"Sorry, Airman. I guess you won't get to go with us after all." I shook his hand.
"Good luck sir and ma'am," he said.
"You three men get in that truck and drive south. That is an order! Where are the batteries?" Tabitha asked.
"Sorry, ma'am. No time to find them. But, we did get a small generator fully fueled and the jumper cables. They are in the back seat," the lieutenant said.
"Anson, will that work?"
"Yeah, it should. We will probably have to reset the circuit breaker on it every time we fry a board though. Hope we have enough time." At least I thought it should work. There were no physical reasons why it shouldn't.
Tabitha saluted the three men and we were off. I climbed into the backseat and Tabitha climbed into the pilot's seat. She cycled the canopy as she brought the engines on line.
"Have you ever flown one of these things before?" I prayed that the answer was yes.
"Never. How hard can it be?" She laughed. "Relax, I have over a thousand hours in these things," she informed me as we lifted vertically and then started horizontally. "Oh and hold on," she said as we cleared the treetops and then she slammed me back into my seat with maximum forward thrust. Then we were on our way back to the crash site or should I say ground zero. Tabitha flew due east until she hit the tornado's track. Then she banked and followed the track north until it turned ninety degrees back west.
"The crash was right at the bend in the track," I told her over the headsets.
"I know." She brought the plane in facing west up the track and descended.
I saw something flicker in my peripheral vision. To the north, just beyond the creek there was something shiny. It looked like a small clearing. Maybe there was a house with a tin roof there. It could have been a fire watchtower. Once we were below the treeline I could no longer see it.
Tabitha brought us down quickly with a bit of a thump!
"Come on, we have about thirteen minutes," she announced. The canopy cycled up. Tabitha was on the ground looking back up at me. I worked the small generator out from between my legs and handed it over to her. I grabbed the cables and jumped to the ground. It was a longer drop than I had expected. I nearly did a faceplant in the sand. I caught myself and rolled. I stood up brushing myself off. Tabitha just giggled a little but said nothing.
We both threw our gear down by the plane and each took a side of the generator. Tabitha set a fast pace up the slight hill to the edge of the clearing where the probe was. I could hear no humming or buzzing. That worried me. The calculations we did for the DARPA program showed that the dumbbells go critical just as the frequency or the sound shifts too high for human ears to detect.
We popped into the clearing and there were already four men hard at work dismantling the probe. All of them wearing military gear and clothing and were armed to the gills. The ECC had stopped buzzing because there were large Van der Graaf generators sitting all around it. They were plugged into a battery supply. The strong static electric field must have frozen the Clemons Dumbbells motion keeping them from going further critical. They still weren't drained or destroyed I assumed. Tabitha and I assumed that help had arrived that we were unaware of. We stepped closer to the probe and the leader of the four men turned toward us with his pistol in his hand.
Johnny Cache (my handyman and secretary not the singer) was there by the probe pointing a handgun at Tabitha and me. I looked at Tabitha. She looked back at me with the same confused look.
"Hello, Dr. Clemons," he said. "I didn't expect that you would come back. You have bigger balls than I thought." Two of the men finished disconnecting the warp field coil housing and lifted the subsection of the cylinder. They rolled it over a network of cabling and cargo straps that they had laid out on the ground. The shiny object I had seen in the clearing just north of the creek must have been a helicopter because it was now hovering over us. A set of cables lowered and the three men other than Johnny Cache connected it to the lowering cables. Johnny talked into his left wrist telling the helicopter to take it up.
"Johnny, what the hell are you doing here?" I asked him.
"I'm earning a living. I wish you hadn't come back, because I kind of like you. But now you will have to die here." He seemed sincerely apologetic.
"What are you doing with the probe components?" asked Tabitha.
"Well, Colonel, I'm selling them to the Chinese. They were going to pick up the whole thing in orbit once the Shuttle was destroyed, but somehow you two managed to bring it back to Earth. Now I'll have to figure out a way to deliver it to them. Of course, it will cost them more. The talk of a meteor crashing in Florida—buzzing all over the news—gave me the idea that this could be the probe. My hunch paid off. Fortunately, I was only an hour or so away by fast helicopter."
"Hunh?" I shook my head. "I don't get it." I also wondered where the good guys were. If Johnny could figure it out, why didn't Space Command?
"He blew up the shuttle." Tabitha pointed at Johnny.
"How could he have done that?" I asked nobody in particular. I was trying to decide how I was going to get that gun away from him. Keep him talking, I thought. Somewhere in the conversation, we could find a distraction. Bob had never taught me how to dodge bullets. I always hoped he would someday. I guess I would just have to wing it, if I got the chance.
Johnny's buddies, employees, or whatever the other three guys were didn't seem to be paying us any attention. They had moved on to removing parts of ECC number two.
"She's right, Dr. Clemons. Security at the Vehicle Assembly Building isn't so tight these days. I placed the explosives in the Shuttle over two weeks ago using your security badge. It wasn't easy to get that from you. You should sleep more. Of course the plan was for the shuttle to explode once you two had assembled the probe and gone back onboard the Shuttle."
"How did the bomb know when to explode? That's impossible," I said, still trying to keep him talking. Tabitha tried to edge slowly sideways toward him.
"Hold still, Colonel or I'll shoot you now," he said calmly. "Planting the explosive and setting it to start the timer after a seven-minute gee loading was easy. Just a simple accelerometer and some simple timing circuitry, nothing fancy required. Your unplanned EVA delayed the flight plan by nearly four hours, hence you were still in the middle of the EVA when the timer set off the explosives."