Storm Killer

Benjamin Blue

 

 

 

 
 
 



 
 

 

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgements
 

I wish to thank my group of manuscript readers who gave me such good suggestions about the story. It is only through their support and constant encouragement that I found the energy and stamina to complete this first part of the forthcoming trilogy. 

     That group includes Boston John, my old pal Ray, and my sister, Debbie, and her husband, Mike. 

     Special thanks to Lydia, my Texas editor who corrected my rotten English and found places for hundreds of commas.   

     And I would like to thank my wife, Marlyn, for her support while I lived like a hermit in my office as I developed, wrote, revised, and published this book.



 

 

 

 

    

 

Introduction
The following excerpt was taken from Milton William Johnson’s Earth History; Life in the Twenty-first Century, second edition, 2455.

“At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it became apparent that winters were becoming colder and more arid. Spring brought torrential whiteout rains and tornadoes of unprecedented strength and frequency. Summer presented draught and high heat. Fall was filled with tropical storms of unimaginable intensity and numbers. 

“Hurricanes seemed to occur earlier and earlier each year. They became stronger and destroyed whole cities and coastlines, such as the low-lying city of New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and Tampa. 

“Dire predictions of global disaster ran rampant through news media. 

“The global technology company, CORDEX, based in Gaithersburg , Maryland, had, in the late 90s, stumbled on a revolutionary optical polymer only two molecules thick that provided perfect, undistorted, high magnification of light. 

“Coming from their think tank group, a proposal for application of this polymer was brought forward to the company executives who saw large dollar signs if the proposal could be sold to the United States government and insurance carriers. 

“They proposed to build a geo-synchronous orbiting station of gigantic proportions that would use the polymer in kilometers of thin film sheets to capture and focus sunlight on the weather-producing engine of a tropical storm. 

“The premise being that application of tremendous heat at specific points in the weather engine of a storm would affect the storm’s ability to grow or even survive by lowering the temperature difference between the lower and upper atmosphere. This would cause the weather engine to short circuit from a lack of energy. 

 “All major insurance companies and the Federal government found merit with the proposal and funded the project with over one hundred billion dollars.  Thus, was born the Storm Killer project.”

 

** To The Reader **

The following events take place two decades later as Storm Killer is about to go operational in its first practical test against real hurricanes. It’s success or failure is in the hands of a small security team aboard the Storm Killer station.  

Between the publishing of the initial CORDEX proposal and the birth of Storm Killer, many of the central characters of the narrated events that follow in this book had life-changing events happen to them. These events shaped the very fabric of their beings and how they would respond to the upcoming Storm Killer incident.

A few of the following chapters will deal with some of these life-changing events as they touched and changed the central players of the Storm Killer incident. The large majority of the following chapters narrate the actual events of that incident. 

These events are as they happened. Storm Killer’s success or failure, the fate of the crew, and the fate of Florida was decided in less than twenty-four hours.

     



 

 

 

 

1

Edna’s Birth
The local sorghum farmers had tried everything to rid themselves of the destructive shoot flies. Insecticides were useless. Introducing genetically altered sterile flies had no impact. 

This year’s hordes of shoot flies were the worst ever seen in the western African nation of Guinea. All of the farmers agreed, the sorghum harvest was most assuredly lost. 

     Nebo Kantonga owned a sorghum farm on the gentle lower slopes of Mount Nimba, the highest mountain in Guinea. He was standing on the creaking ancient wooden platform that served as a porch in front of his dilapidated tworoom house gazing at the heavily forested terrain below him. 

His great grandfather’s had built the house with just a hammer and a handsaw.  The outside had never seen paint of any sort. The inside had seen too much paint over the years and now lead poisoning threaten the health of his children. But that was the least of his concerns at the moment. 

His home was situated so that from this vantage point he could actually see the border of Liberia twenty kilometers away today. Today was extremely hot. But it was still early in the day and the air had not filled with the haze normally hanging over the dense forest in summer.  

     While Nebo gazed at the awe-inspiring view with a vacant stare, his mind was focused on the fly problem. His crop was doomed. No crop, no money. He might be forced to sell the family farm. It had been in his family for ten generations and he knew no other occupation. He saw his wife and eight children in his mind’s eye as he thought sorrowfully. How will I care for my family?    

     He picked up his shovel and walked down to the field of sorghum that lay on the leeward side of the slope. This area received only ten percent of the rain of the windward side. Sorghum grass thrived in this more arid environment. 

As he approached the field, he saw the plants were covered in the small tan colored shoot flies. He became almost hysterical when he saw this. He ran into the field wielding the shovel as a futile weapon. He swung and swung at the flies until his arms felt on fire and his breath came in ragged gasps. The flies would leap away from his shovel’s path only to instantly return to their feeding.

On his last futile swing, his shovel made contact with a single shoot fly that caromed from the shovel to ground.  The fly, even though gravely injured, raised itself in the air and started flying higher and higher. This was made more difficult by the grains of sand that had attached itself to the fly’s sticky thorax where the shovel had cracked the exterior shell. 

As the fly used its last reserves of strength, it began to fall back toward the ground almost eight hundred meters below it. It was suddenly caught in a tremendous updraft caused by the early morning sun’s heating of the air.  Tumbling over and over, it was lifted higher and higher. Until, finally, it drew abreast of the summit of Mount Nimba where the upward current final ended. 

A single grain of very fine sand fell from the fly’s body as it struggled to right itself and fly again. What became of the fly will never be known. But the grain of sand was caught in another, even more powerful wind funneled upward by the very shape of the mountain. This updraft carried the grain all the way to the troposphere. Along the way, a small negative electrical charge built up on the grain of sand. The attracted other grains of sand and debris being blown higher and higher into the atmosphere. As the grains attracted and stuck together, liquid water formed around the still warm grains from the frigid water-ice vapor held aloft by the winds. 

These grains, now inside a large water drop, began to fall back to earth. Another updraft caught the drop and blew it apart into two drops. These two drops, still warmer than the surrounding air grew in size as more water liquefied. This process was repeated hundreds of times with each drop splitting into two or more each time the updraft caught them. 

Within a very short time, the single drop had become billions. These billions formed an ever-growing thunderhead. The sky blackened, as the billions became trillions. Soon the weight of the drops overcame the updrafts and fell to the ground. A torrential tropical rain shower was born. 

Normally the clouds would be pulled apart by various factors like wind shear. But conditions today were extremely favorable for cloud formation and as more and more rain fell, the temperature variances became greater and greater between the upper atmosphere and ground. This led to even stronger updrafts.  

Eventually, the storm turned into a tropical wave that thundered off the Atlantic coast of Guinea heading due west. 

The ocean waters had been heating all summer. It had been an exceptionally hot summer and now the waters contained the maximum amount of stored energy and heat. The upper winds were calm. Conditions were favorable for the metamorphous of the tropical wave into a tropical depression.

Conditions continued to be advantageous for the now serious but still fledging storm. It fed on the stored energy of the water. Growing in size and intensity until, finally, it achieved tropical storm status and was named Edna. 

Another three days found Edna achieving hurricane status as she continued her way west by north west. 

Nebo Kantonga, the simple farmer, would have never been able to grasp the fact that his single act of frustration against the pesky shoot fly had caused Hurricane Edna to be born.                           



 

 

 

 

 

 

2
The Plan
The woman looked long and hard at the man seated across the table, peering deep into the man’s eyes.  She looked down at her hands as she said in a flat tone, “You’ll have to be electrocuted.” 

     The man didn’t stir or respond. He simply sat opposite the woman and seemed to be inspecting the ceiling. He cleared his throat, opened his mouth as if to speak, and then closed it.

The woman got up from the table and shambled toward the coffee pot on the counter. She moved slowly in an almost duck walk gait because of the low-gravity environment. 

She turned to look at the man still seated at the table and repeated. “You’ll have to be electrocuted. Yes, I think that’s best. You’ll be electrocuted.”

The woman turned back to the counter and poured two steaming cups from the stainless steel coffee pot. She snapped lids onto the cups to keep the coffee from sloshing out in the low gravity. 

She carried them to the table and placed one in front of the man seated there. She sat down across the table from him. They removed the lids, blew on the surface of the dark hot liquid, and took careful sips.

The two had similar features: piercing brown eyes, a sharp but well-shaped nose, thick auburn hair, and a dark complexion. They shared other traits, like the way they held their coffee cups, the pursing of the lips to blow on the coffee cup to cool the hot liquid, and the way their faces showed emotions.

The man remarked, “Good coffee, sis. You really know how to brew a good pot of coff--.”

She angrily cut him off. “Don’t make any reference to our family relationship! Especially not here, and especially not now! No one must know we’re related. Got it?”

He sighed, held up his hands in surrender, and slowly nodded his agreement. “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry! I should know better. You’re right. We have to be very careful while we’re here. Until… Until what I’ve got to do is over and done. ”

The woman went back to staring at the dark liquid in her cup. She looked sad.

The man leaned over and took her hand across the table, “I know you don’t agree with what I’m going to do.”

“No, I definitely don’t agree with any of this,” the woman almost shouted at the man. Then in an almost inaudible voice she said, “But I’ve got little choice, do I?”

“No, you don’t.”

They sat quietly for a minute or more sipping their coffees. Each was deep in their private thoughts about the near future.

The man absentmindedly reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a pack of gum. He removed a stick, carefully removed the paper sleeve, unfolded the foil wrap, and placed the gum in his mouth. He then very carefully refolded the gum’s foil wrapper, replaced the paper sleeve, and returned it to the pack.

He quietly chewed on the new stick as the silence continued to permeate the room.

The woman stirred and broke the silence. “Like I said before, you’ll have to be electrocuted.”

The man smiled sadly, nodded and sighed heavily as if he were very tired. “That sounds like the right approach. I’ll be electrocuted.”

The man appeared to be deep in thought for a moment and then added, “Make sure the emergency oxygen bottle is tough to get off the sled. That’ll add another thirty to forty-five seconds to the time to revive me.”

The woman nodded, “Okay, I can make sure the bottle gets tangled up with some other gear.”

She grabbed the man’s left hand and leaned over the table until her face was only inches from his. The woman implored, “Please. Rethink this! There’s still time to end this madness!”

The man shook his head and slammed his open right hand on the table. “Enough! Hold your tongue! I’ve gotta do this! It’s time for people to pay. Pay for their disregard and lack of understanding. No, that’s wrong. They do have understanding; they just don’t give a crap. But they will soon. Oh yes, they will soon.”

He glanced at his wristwatch and patted the back of the woman’s hand. “I’ve got to leave before someone gets curious about why I’m here so long. Remember to tangle up the oxygen bottle! The way things are going, I will probably have to be electrocuted within the next twenty-four hours. So be ready to act.”

They stood up, hugged, and the man left the woman’s table.

The woman remained standing, staring at the man’s back as he left the room. She sat down at the table as if the weight of the world were on her shoulders. Even in the low gravity, she seemed to be weighted down by the situation.      Her eyes glistened with tears as she whispered, “Yes, my dear brother, electrocution is the best path for you. Oh my God, what are we doing? What am I doing?” And then she dropped her head into her hands and cried.

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3

Storm Killer
Adam Sand glanced from Storm Killer to the background of Earth. From this height one could see the entire hemisphere. They were in geo-synchronous orbit permanently positioned over the east coast of the United States. He could see a hurricane approaching Florida. It’s early for a storm like this. It’s only late August. Normally hurricanes form much later in the year. He thought to himself as he surveyed the storm. He muttered to him self, “Normal? Things in weather haven’t been “normal” for several years now.” He pondered. Maybe what’s happening now is going to be the new normal. How many Category Five storms have we had the last three years?  Nine, or ten? What difference does it make? One is more than enough. 

His eyes returned to the immense station known as the Storm Killer project. It was the largest engineering project ever attempted by the human race. It dwarfed projects like the ancient pyramids of Giza, and the Hoover or Three Gorges dams. It was more ambitious than the Great Wall of China. In fact, it was a more complex, and far more expensive project than all of these others put together, and Adam was the project manager for its construction.

The station seemed to hang in the emptiness of space. Every time he looked at it he was awestruck by its size. One could not appreciate the sheer size without some human point of reference. Adam used the small fleet of shuttles that ferried supplies and materials between Earth and Storm Killer. Currently there were three shuttles docked at the station. Two were from NASA in the United States, and one was from JAXA, the Japanese space agency. Each was the size of a 747 aircraft. Yet, the three shuttles were very small protrusions from the top of the station’s southern sphere. These small pimples on Storm Killer’s skin gave a clear indication of the immensity of the station.     

The station looked like an antique erector set mixed with LEGO blocks gone wild. Attached at each end of its central two-kilometer-long titanium column were large spheres of the same material. The twin spheres were each over three quarters of a kilometer in diameter. The entire assembly resembled a dumbbell and most of the contractors involved in the station’s construction simply called it that.

At the top of each sphere sprouted several square blocks that contained the station’s power plants, air purification and recovery facilities as well as several ongoing scientific experiments. These units were attached to the station by one-hundred-meter-long transport tubes set at various angles from the spheres.

From each sphere of the dumbbell radiated two rows of six equal spaced arms made of spindly carbon fiber rods each about nineteen hundred meters in length. Between the rods were loosely folded gossamer-thin panels of a translucent film. The panels were almost invisible until the sunlight struck them at certain points during the station’s slow rotation.

Adam watched the work crew align the final panel to the final anchor point of the final rod. He was extremely uncomfortable in his environmental suit, but the comfort issue was the furthest thing from his thoughts. He was elated by the completion of the final panel. The slight adjustments being made to the panel now made Storm Killer operational.

As of tomorrow, Man would forever take away control of the Earth’s weather from jaded Mpther Nature’s eternal grasp.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4

Ten Years Earlier; 
Damaged Goods
The girl features ran through the alley as fast as she could. She was slowed by the backpack of books and school supplies bouncing on her back. She was threading her way through some of the back streets and alleys of the Angelino Heights section of the Echo Park district of greater Los Angeles. The rears of gracious Victorian homes sprawled on both sides of the narrow alley she now traversed.  

     She had classic Latin features and temperament. Dark, flashing brown eyes, long luxurious dark hair, smooth olive skin, and a zest for life few possessed.    

She wore the black and green uniform of Belmont High School. She was a senior there. The school, originally opened in the early 1920s, had been renovated several years earlier. Her family had used one of the rooms there for her eighteenth birthday just two weeks ago. The building was now in flames as the rioters had moved deeper into Angelino Heights. The students had run from the building as the headmaster’s voice had boomed from the PA system, “The rioters have broken through the police cordon! Run! Run for your lives! The rioters are only a block away!”

The riots had started five days before and escalated from an initial peaceful demonstration to the current civil war with the illegal immigrants and disenfranchised minorities in Southern California on one side and the local and Federal authorities on the other. 

After the Federal government had promulgated the Immigration Reform Act deportations had begun. Families containing illegals and children born within the United States during the parents’ illegal stay were being ripped apart. The children were allowed to stay as birthright U.S. citizens while their parents were being deported. Underage children of these families were being fed into the various states’ child protection services and farmed out into temporary foster homes. 

In California, Children and Family Services had failed miserably due to the sheer volume of children delivered into the system as the Immigration and Naturalization Service began forcefully applying the provisions of the new laws. This failure had culminated in a brother and sister of one such family, age six and five respectively, slipping through the support system and ending up dead in the Puente Hills landfill. An investigation was underway to determine what had happened to the children and how Child Services had failed so completely. 

This event had led to the initial demonstration five days prior. Over twenty thousand illegal aliens and another five thousand U.S. citizens supporting them had attended that demonstration. 

Local law enforcement, pushed by the Federal Government’s demand to quell any civil disturbance relating to the new laws, had reacted strongly to the unplanned and unlicensed demonstration around the City Hall complex. 

Police lines had started at the intersection of 3rd Street and North Main at one end, and Aliso Street and North Main at the other end. They had marched down Main Street using their batons, tear gas, and water cannon to subdue the demonstrators. Over three hundred arrests were made. Twenty-two people were admitted to local hospitals for injuries associated with the police action. 

The following day over sixty thousand had begun a demonstration protesting the prior day’s events. Two supposed demonstrators at 3rd and North Main had pulled assault rifles from a panel truck and opened fire on the police line as it was being formed. Three officers were killed and five more wounded. The police were determined to arrest the culprits and moved into the crowd closest to the point of attack. They found the now empty rifles lying on sidewalk, but no one could identify who had dropped the guns. The police became overly aggressive and began arresting anyone who was in the area of the attack. The angry police summarily beat to the ground anyone resisting arrest. The police shot two men, thought to be the shooters, as they attempted to run from the scene. It would later be determined that they were two reporters running to cover a police beating of a young pregnant woman who had spit in the face of a cop. 

The situation rapidly deteriorated into open warfare between the illegals and their supporters on one side, and the police on the other. 

The violence spread nationally through the entire minority community that, for years, had felt abandoned. Many of the younger disenfranchised hade made ties with overseas terrorist organizations and awaited their order to begin the systematic destruction of the country’s infrastructure. 

On the third day of the violence, the terrorist leaders gave the order. Acts of terrorism boiled over across the entire country, but the worst of the situation continued to be in the Los Angeles basin.   

The city erupted into sporadic sniper fire, citywide arson, and beatings of anyone felt to be “on the other side”. That night, in two portions of the city, firefights with assault weapons had broken out with high causalities on both sides. Bombs were detonated in almost every public building in the city.

The early morning light illuminated a city in flames, with flashes of automatic weapons fire dotting the rooflines of the districts of South Los Angeles, Hyde Park, Crenshaw, and Echo Park.     

The National Guard had been called out, but was now spread thin by pitched battles in Sacramento, Fresno, and all of Southern California. Over thirty percent of the National Guard had deserted in disagreement with the laws that had started the violence.  

Rioters had now entered the mob rule phase and all civil order was breaking down. The mob entering the Echo Park district brandished weapons of all sorts. The mob was a now mindless animal seeking destruction, murder, rape, and the infliction of pain for their enemy. The enemy was anyone still sane and civilized. 

The girl was running from this animal. She was sobbing between pants of breath as she ran toward the safety of her home. 

As she neared the end of the alley, two men entered it from the far end and spotted her. She almost fell as she heard them yelling, “Stop my little Lolita! We have a present for you!” They then laughed as they began chasing her. She turned right at the end of the alley and entered the tree-lined boulevard where her home was located.  

She ran for her life as the men closed the distance between them and her. She turned into her driveway and ran to the front door. It stood open but the significance of this did not dawn on her as she ran inside and slammed the door. She turned, threw the door lock, and leaned her back on the door as she caught her breath. 

She held her eyes closed as she gasped for air. It was only after her breathing returned to a somewhat normal state that she opened her eyes. What she saw made here stomach heave. On the threshold to stairs leading to the bedrooms above lay her grandfather. The back of his head was partially blown away. He lay in a pool of blood and pieces of brain. His eyes were open with astonishment still registered on his face.          

She retched and vomited up the school lunch she had eaten less than an hour ago. A lunch she had eaten before the world, as she knew it, came to an end. 

She heard the two men run up the steps of the front porch and bang on the door. Panicked, she ran passed her grandfather’s body up the stairs toward the sanctuary of her bedroom. 

The two men at the door stopped their banging and moved to the front windows behind the porch swing. They used the butt of the pistol of one of the men to break the upper glass pane. He reached in, unlocked the lower window and gingerly entered the home avoiding the broken glass scattered around the window opening. 

The last thing she saw was the one man’s left foot come through the window as she reached the stop of the stairs and ran down the hall in the direction of her bedroom. 

She moved quickly toward her room when she heard the sounds coming from her mother’s room. She stopped at the door and looked in to see two men holding her mother down on the bed while a third man violated her. She heard her mother grunt each time the man shoved forward. She stood frozen as she watched the scene. The two men holding down her mother’s arms saw her at the same time. One of them released her mother’s arm as he sneered. “You want some of this girlie? Come on in, your next!” The man started moving toward her with that same malevolent sneer. 

She turned to run and was grabbed by the man with gun that had entered through the window below. He looked into the room at the scene of the three violent men and one struggling woman and spat at the men as he waved his pistol, “You can have the old lady. Me and my partner are going to take care of little Lolita here.”  

For the first time she really looked at her captors. The one doing all of the talking was a middle-aged, overweight man of Hispanic origin of about forty years of age. His accomplice was a younger, rail-thin, brown curly haired man appearing to be a Caucasian about twenty years old. If the situation had been different, she may have actually thought the younger man was cute. Now, she wished him death. 

Fight as she might, the two intruders carried her to her bedroom at the end of the hall and threw her on the bed. The two men quickly trussed her hands behind her back on the bed and placed an old handkerchief in her mouth as a gag. 

The older man looked around her room and picked the pillow with the name, Kim, embroidered in hot pink thread. “So, is that your name, my little one? Kim?”

The girl simply stared at the man with venom spewing from her eyes. 

The man laughed and looked at his young partner. “Larry, let me introduce you to Kim. Kim, this is Larry. Larry is going to get to know you real well over the next few days.” The older man giggled as he saw her eyes move to his young accomplice. “You like him, don’t you? You want to make him happy, don’t you? Just like your mother is making those other three guys happy.” As if to properly punctuate the older man’s last statement, a loud cry of agony came from the other bedroom.     

The younger man held a gun on her and the other began to unbuckle his belt. He chuckled, “Now, my little Kim, lay back and enjoy. Let old Arturo and Larry show you how to be a woman. After we finish with you, if you’re good, we just might let you live. But you see, my little one, I like hurting my conquests if they don’t cooperate. So, I’m afraid you’ll not like some of the pain I plan to put you through if you don’t do what I say.”  

The girl’s eyes showed fire as she shook her head and tried to kick the man speaking to her. The man danced back and away from her arching foot. He smiled evilly, danced in and smacked her face hard with his open hand. He grabbed her hair with his other hand, pulled her head up from the bed, and started smacking her repeatedly. The blows were harder and harder with each smack.   

After that, she remembered very little other than pain. The continuous attacks of the two men were eventually replaced by the attack of the three men who had ravaged her mother. Then her original two captors used her again. The next day and night became a blur of pain, humiliation, and subjugation. 

She was tied to her bed and was drifting in and out of awareness. She heard gunshots but paid no attention in her current state. She had left her body to mentally reside somewhere else while these men abused her. 

She heard sounds of crashing plates, shouts, and gunfire as she re-entered her body and fell into a deep pain-wracked sleep. 

When she awoke she was wrapped in a clean gown under crisp sheets. A woman, dressed in a white uniform, was staring intently at her with a concerned look on her face. “Are you with us, child? No! Don’t try to say anything. Just nod your head. Your jaw is wired shut. It was broken in two places.” 

The girl nodded and slowly turned her head to look around the room. The woman picked up the girl’s hand and gently held it while she talked with the girl. 

“Before you try to ask, let me tell you what I know. Okay?” 

The girl nodded her head silently. She felt pain all over her body and tears began to form in the corners of her eyes. 

“You’re in a hospital in Pasadena. The National Guard found you when they took back your neighborhood from the rioters. The brutes hurt you badly. We know you went through hell. Just relax -- it’s all over. The men are dead. Killed by your liberators.” 

“I’m a nurse. The name is Betsy. I’ll try to tend your needs until you are well enough to do for yourself. You’ve been here for eight days and have been kept sedated. The doctors decided that you were healed enough to wake up, so we stopped those drugs last night.”

The woman looked uneasy as she continued, “Your mom didn’t make it. She died of her injuries at the house sometime on the day you were captured. I probably shouldn’t have told you that now, but you really needed to know. Her funeral was four days ago. I’m so sorry. I lost my own mother to violence. From a home burglary gone very wrong. ” 

The girl turned her head away from the nurse and quietly cried until she could cry no more. Betsy had been in and out of the room many times checking on her, adjusting IV lines, and giving her medications but had never said anything else of a personal nature to her. 

The girl began to look forward to Betsy and the other nurses’ visits with the morphine vial. When she received the painkiller, she became calm and serene. These were the only times she felt that way. She almost couldn’t wait for the next dose that would give her that euphoric feeling.  

As Kim slowly mended she could set up and communicate with the nurse and visitors by written note. Her father had visited her several times. He was divorced from her mother for many years and had married a woman in Long Beach. They had a boy two years younger than she that was her half-brother. Her father had sired this son while still married to her mother.

Kim had never held her father or his new wife responsible for the breakup of her family. Her mother, at best of times, had been a shrew. Her mother had relentlessly denigrated her father. It really didn’t surprise Kim when her father announced he was seeking a divorce. Nor did it really surprise her to know that she had a half-brother. Her father had mellowed the last few years of the marriage in a way that always made Kim feel he had another woman. Another woman who treated him like the wonderful person Kim knew her father truly was.      

One day, as Betsy was changing Kim’s bandages, the girl had gotten up her courage to ask questions about her attackers. She wrote her questions out and Betsy answered what she could. She had been shocked to learn that authorities thought the three men still in house when they arrived were all of her attackers.

She wrote a note to Betsy:

But what about the other two men? The ones that first captured me?  

Betsy had gotten the police to come and interview the girl about these men but things were still so chaotic in Los Angeles, and nothing was ever found of these men. Even knowing the first names and having police artist sketches of the two perpetrators weren’t sufficient clues to give the police any leads. The investigation was now a cold case in a box on a shelf in a file room somewhere. 

As the girl recovered and learned that the two men had apparently gotten away with their crimes against her, she became resolute in her life’s goal. She would become a police investigator and run down the evil men of the world. Hopefully, someday, she could open that cold case box and solve the mystery of the two men’s identity and bring them to justice for their brutal crimes. She needed experience and skills in detective work first.

As the girl was about to fall asleep in the spare room of her father’s home on the first night of her release from the hospital, she vowed to her self, I’ll find you someday. You’ll pay for what you did to my mother and me. Until then, I dedicate my life to finding villains like you.               



 

 

 

 

 

 

5

Enemies
The two men in business suits slowly walked up hill toward Emperor Maximilian’s castle at the top of the hill in Chapultepec Park. The castle was once the palatial home to the Emperor Maximilian and his wife, Empress Carlota. Now, it was home the National Museum of History.

The park, a well-known tourist attraction, was located in the outskirts of Mexico City. The well-dressed men seemed out of place among all the gaudily clad tourists.

It was obvious that the men were not there as tourists. They looked neither left nor right as they moved up the walkway. They took no notice of the wonderful smells and noises emanating from the street vendors scattered on the sides of the walkway hawking their carts’ delicacies. Nor did the men seem to notice the lunch hour crowd gathered to purchase their mid-day meals from these vendors.

They appeared to be in a heated debate as they weaved their way through the crowd. Their waving arms and hand gestures showed a serious disagreement was underway.

They were about the same height but the older, dark-skinned, gray-haired man was a good seventy pounds heavier than the younger dark-haired man. It was obvious from his trim build and light step that the younger man belonged to a gym and attended on a regular basis. The older man walked in a fast, but ponderous flat-footed step in his attempt to keep pace with the younger man.

“If we must, we will have our operatives destroy the damned thing. We’ll end its operation almost as soon as it starts,” the older man emphatically spoke to his companion.

“No, sir. We should only disable the beast. It may prove useful sometime in the future, once the technology is proven,” the younger, lighter-skinned man replied in a heated voice.

“Proven technology? Proven how? That thing will never be allowed to threaten our shores! We stopped them in the nineteen fifties and we will stop them now!” the older man spat.

“Please talk with your associates in the other countries before committing to its destruction,” pled the younger man, as he grabbed the older man by the arm, stopping him in the middle of the walkway.

The older man pulled away in apparent disdain and leveled a stare at the younger man.

“What do you think you’re doing, Antonio? How dare you touch my person! You take far too many liberties for an assistant!” the older man roared at the now petrified younger man.

As soon as he had touched his employer’s arm, he knew he had crossed a line. While he was a close advisor to his employer, he was neither a friend nor family member.

“Pardon me, sir. I was overcome with emotion and forgot my place,” Antonio apologized as he slightly bowed to his employer, Mexico’s Federal Senator Carlos Gutierrez of the Caribbean coast Mexican state of Quintana Roo. Quintana Roo, on the Yucatan peninsula, contained the resorts of Cozumel and Cancun.

These resort areas were hard hit by hurricanes on a frequent basis. Any experiments that could cause these storms to change, for good or bad, was a high priority for Quintana Roo’s elected representative.

Quintana Roo’s senatorial representative, in the nineteen fifties, had led the charge to have the United States cease hurricane cloud seeding experiments because of the possibilities that the experiment would make the storm worse and that it would strike the Yucatan.

That Quintana Roo senatorial representative was Carlos Gutierrez’s father.

The current Senator Gutierrez was fighting a new political war with the United States over the proposed use of this technology, orbiting in a stationary position over Quintana Roo’s residents’ collective head.

The Senator’s fight was on the public political stage and was coming to head in a requested meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss the United States’ use of this technology. But more sinister, was the unspoken private war the Senator had launched involving paid spies and possibly worse, if the technology did, indeed, become operational.

Antonio De La Cruz, the Senator’s personal assistant, was distraught over how this espionage front might play out if and when the political front failed to find a solution. The Senator is digging himself in deep with the wrong people, Antonio thought as the offended Senator began walking again. I’ve got to do something, but what?



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6

Ready For Operation
As project leader, it had been Adam Sand’s job to bring this project to fruition and he had finally accomplished it. He scanned the structure that was Storm Killer. It was flimsy by all Earth-side construction standards but unless it was hit by a solar storm of unforeseen size, it should perform its duties for many decades to come.

Adam glided toward the airlock a half a kilometer away at the center of the station’s northern pole. He could see the airlock navigation light blinking between yellow and green pointing the way to the airlock entrance. There was an identical airlock on the southern pole, but that one was over two kilometers away.

Using his Personnel Propulsion Unit, Adam slowly moved toward the blinking light of main airlock number two. He let the navigation computer automatically adjust the steering jets of the PPU to move him toward the airlock.

A PPU was a small open square box contraption with a ball on top. From the ball, small jet apertures extended in every direction. The box contained a small panel with several indicator lamps and a joystick that the user manipulated to control CO2 gas releases from the selected apertures.

The CO2 was stored under high pressure in a round tank inside the boxy frame of the PPU. The gas was replenished by extracting the waste from the crew’s breathing as well as other waste from various processes on the station. While the hydroponics section used living green plants to convert a portion of the CO2 back to breathable air, the vast majority of the gas was captured and used in the PPU devices.

Flipping the auto-nav off, Adam took manual control of the PPU. He reversed the PPU and slowed himself, stopping just short of the entrance. He pulled himself to the control box protruding from the side of the central core and punched the OPEN pad.

The airlock cycled out and stored the precious air supply in the interior chamber and then the outer door slid open with no sound or vibration.

He entered and touched the CLOSE pad. The two indicator lamps above the pad flipped in sequence from red to green as the computer program verified the inner door was still secure, and that the outer door had closed properly and was secure. Once the doors were verified, the system pumped air into the chamber. He removed his pressure helmet, pressed the open button for the inner door, and entered the interior of Storm Killer. The inner door opened into a small room.

This five-by-five meter room, known by Dumbbell’s inhabitants as ‘Reception’, had no furniture and bare metal walls except for one stenciled sign that provided instructions for the new arrival as to how and where to proceed.

Duct taped to the far wall was a handwritten sign saying simply, “Welcome Aboard Dumbbell.” One could take the welcome sign several ways: first was you were being welcomed aboard the station nicknamed Dumbbell, or second, you were a dumbbell for being here. Adam had thought it meant both when he had written and surreptitiously posted the sign late one night the first week after the station’s hull was completed.

A set of hand pulls led along the almost one-eighth of a kilometer long corridor into a receiving area that had a ramp leading toward a cylinder going “up” toward the exact center of the core. “Up” was a relative term based on the viewer’s current perception of what was “down”.

The entrance to the central axis, known as the “core”, was dramatic to new and old personnel alike. An arriving person jumping onto the core’s rotating floor would grab a handrail similar to an escalator’s.

Once they had regained their balance and looked over their heads, they saw a cylindrical area of almost one and a half kilometers in length and seven hundred meters from one side to another.

The immense space between the interior walls of the cylinder were divided with catwalks and various windowless box-shaped structures, fifty meters per side, hanging from suspension cables from a central stationary shaft that ran the length of the core. These were scattered in an apparent random pattern throughout the vast empty space of the cylinder.

These large, square, hanging boxlike structures were actually enclosed work areas. The designers of Storm Killer had noted that because it was a hollow cylinder, there was a tremendous volume of unused space between the “ground” and the core’s axis. Their solution to taking advantage of this unused space was these hanging box work areas, laboratories, and office spaces.

Various contractors from many nations had their offices and support services in these spaces. Some even lived in this shantytown of flying offices. In fact, certain of these spaces were considered the sovereign territory of specific nations like Japan, Great Britain, Mexico, Russia, and China. These spaces held the various nations’ consulate representatives and scientific missions. The entire area of hanging structures was known as Core City.

Set along the fixed places on the core’s rotating walls or more accurately, the floor, were more familiar looking structures resembling normal buildings and houses. They were scatter around the entire inner hull, but a large concentration was half a kilometer from the arbitrary “southern” pole. This was the working and living space for the prime contractor, the government officials who watchdog the contractors’ expenditures and quality levels, and the primary team of professionals and scientists who dreamed up this project.

This area also housed the control center for the entire structure. It was the only light green-colored structure in the core. This center handled the environmental, water and sewer systems, power generation, and the Storm Killer command and control functions.

The spot from which one observed this scene was slightly offset from the center of the stationary shaft.

There were eight such spots located at equal spaces around the core. From this spot four single-person elevators were installed that ran down to the “floor” of the core.

The “elevator” was nothing more than an open-air dual t-bar arrangement. The “down” end of the elevator had a t-bar with two straps into which the rider placed their feet. The “up” end of the elevator had a t-bar that the rider could grasp with hands or connect to with several bungee cords that dangled from it. Each elevator serviced a quadrant of the floor five hundred and fifty meters below.

After pushing the elevator ‘down’ button, the ride took eight minutes and the rider started feeling more and more weight as the elevator neared the rotating floor of the core.

When a rider reached the floor, he or she could take the light rail system. This was a set of electric passenger cars running every twenty minutes between the main business areas on the floor and elevators to the central hub’s poles’ airlocks. There were three similar rail systems servicing the other elevator terminuses located at each quadrant of the floor.

If a rider was a VIP, they could make use of the garage of electric golf cart conveyances housed at each elevator terminus.

Adam entered the garage and took the closest cart. He inserted his identification card into the cart’s ignition system, received the appropriate authorization and mashed his foot on the accelerator. The little cart leaped forward as he floored the vehicle to maximum acceleration. He drove to the command center building located about five minutes from the elevator terminus. He parked the cart in a space with a sign reading “Reserved for Project Manager.”

Adam entered the building and glanced at the empty chair behind the reception desk. Since this was a closed environment circling some two thousand kilometers above Earth, it didn’t seem to require huge security measures to ensure only authorized personnel go into restricted areas. After all, within a week of arrival all two hundred residents knew the new arrival by first name.

The only two locations in all of Storm Killer that had fingerprint and retinal scanning security access were the Command Center and the core’s environmental center. Everywhere else was open to any one who wished to walk in.

Adam entered the small white vestibule behind the reception desk. The vestibule held no furnishing other than a single white pedestal next to the closed security door opposite where he had just entered. The pedestal held an access card receiving slot, a keypad, a fingerprint scanner pad, an optical scanning device, and two banks of four indicator lamps. One bank was red and one bank was green. At the moment, all red indicators were lit.

Adam entered his access card in the receiving slot, typed in his six-digit password, and placed his right index finger on the scanner. As he performed each function, the corresponding red indicator switched to green.

A computer-generated female voice ordered, “Please perform retinal scan.” Adam placed his right eye socket against the small cup device mounted just above the card slot.

A low-powered laser beam scanned his retina from top to bottom and then left to right. The computer checked his retinal blood vessel pattern against his stored security file image, looking to compare at least one hundred reference points. Retinas were as unique as fingerprints; no two people had the same pattern of blood vessels. A few seconds passed, the last red lamp switched to green, and the same voice declared, “Access granted, Mr. Sands”.

Adam heard the security door’s locks release. He walked to the door and gave it a small push.



 

 

 

 

 

 

7

Money, Money, Money
The slim middle-aged man in an Armani business suit walked briskly down Georgetown’s O Street. He was nearing the corner at Rock Creek Park where O Street turns into 26th Street. This area was brimming with townhouses of many of the Washington, D.C. rich and famous.

He carried a thin attaché case of simple black leather with chrome locks and handle.

He read the uniform brass plaques house numbers as he walked down the street. Finally, he saw the one he sought. Turning onto the short sidewalk to the three granite steps leading to the front door, he hesitated long enough to straighten his tie and daub his sweaty brow with his handkerchief.

It was one of those miserable hot and humid late August days so well known by the area locals. The humidity and the temperature both hovered around ninety-nine. The combination left residents feeling like they were inside a steaming sauna. Even this man, with his Central America upbringing, found this time of the year in Washington oppressive.

Arriving at the front door, he rang the bell. A portly man wearing shorts, a polo shirt and socks with no shoes opened the door. His thinning gray hair adorned the top of his rotund face.

“Yes? Can I help you?” the man asked of the caller.

“Senor Doctor? I am from our mutual friends in Mexico,” the well-dressed caller stated in a very heavy Spanish accent. “May I enter?”

“Certainly, please come in,” the man, referred to as doctor by the caller, responded jovially as he eyed the attaché case swinging from his caller’s right hand.

“Come with me to the kitchen. I have coffee brewed and was just having my first cup of the day.”

The caller’s eyebrows rose slightly as it was now almost two o’clock in the afternoon.

The Doctor chuckled when he saw the other man’s quizzical expression. “Some of us, in our roles of senior advisors, have very long, late night meetings at the White House.”

“Ah, yes, I see,” replied the caller. His eyes met the Doctor’s. The Doctor thought. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then this man has no soul.

Nothing could be seen in those vacant dark brown, almost black, eyes. No hint of emotion, no hint of humanity, just black holes.
The Doctor asked, “What shall I call you?”

“My name is not important, but if you must call me something, call me Carlos.”

After receiving his coffee and joining the doctor at the kitchen table, Carlos placed the attaché case on the table and slid it across to him. “Here is the payment information as you requested. Two hundred and fifty million dollars deposited in three separate Cayman accounts. One account contains two hundred million dollars, as instructed. The other two accounts of equal shares of twenty-five million each, also as instructed.”

The Doctor opened the case and stared at the contents.

Carlos continued, “We have met our end of the bargain and now we expect you to meet your end.”

The doctor smiled as he glanced through the various account numbers, assigned password, and wire transfer confirmations. Everything appeared to be in order just as he had instructed his contact in Mexico.

Carlos stated, “Based on our independent, on-board intelligence, the station will go fully operational sometime tomorrow morning. We expect that status to change drastically for the amount of money we are paying you and your associates.”

The doctor nodded, “Yes, my daily update from the station indicates it’ll go live sometime in the next twelve hours and command will be turned over at that time. We’ll launch our plans at the moment of the turnover. Never fear, the station will fail to accomplish its mission in the most worldwide, spectacular, public-attention-grabbing manner possible.”

“You seem confident, doctor. Let us just hope you are right. I would hate to think of the consequences of failure on your part,” Carlos stated with no hint of emotion.

The doctor shuddered at the subtle hint of mayhem to occur on his person if he failed to deliver. “Report back to our mutual friends, that they should not worry. Our intervention has been in plan for over four years. I have the right people in the right positions to accomplish this!”

Carlos stood and bowed slightly from the waist. “As you say, doctor. I will take my leave and wish you and your team well.”

The doctor let the man out of the front door and quietly closed it behind him. He rubbed his hands together and chortled. There’s nothing to stop us! Storm Killer will die soon after it’s born!

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8

Change of Command
Adam pushed through the security door and entered the office area of CORDEX, the prime contractor of Storm Killer. CORDEX had become the prime contractor because the company had patented the special high magnification optical polymer film that was at the very heart of Storm Killer. He strode down the walkway between the two work areas to the one walled office in this part of the building. His stride was the half walking, half hopping gait of a professional low gravity specialist.

The name plaque on door to the office stated,

ADAM R. SANDS


PROJECT DIRECTOR
STORM KILLER
Someone had written under it in a flowing script, “Subcontractor killer, too.” This was a touch at humor about the infamous story of how Adam would slice and dice subcontractors that failed to meet his standards. 

Adam was raised in upstate New York on a farm that grew apples in a dozen different orchards around the county. The farm had a small stable of several workhorses that were used for furrowing to keep weeds down in the orchards. He loved horses almost as much as he loved his profession.

Adam was such a precocious child that he skipped two grades in his K-12 years, and had graduated from MIT at the age of twenty. He held academic degrees in electrical and mechanical engineering, physics, and business administration. He was a thoroughly professional individual with an extremely dry sense of humor. He had no time for a girlfriend and no wish for a wife. Part of his shyness with the opposite sex was attributed to skipping grades because of his academic accomplishments.

But sadly, his inter-personal relationships had not matured at the same rate as his older high school classmates. He was always several years their inferior in socialization skills development.

He was dedicated to his craft, which was leading technical projects through the toughest of conditions. Adam had successfully led over a dozen top-secret technical projects at Area 51, during his ten-year military career in the Air Force.

CORDEX had personnel involved with almost all of those projects and its executive management had been greatly impressed with Adam’s organizational and problem-solving skills. They prodded and cajoled Adam about accepting a position with CORDEX for several years before Adam finally relented. They finally convinced him to come on board when they disclosed the eyes-only plans to build Storm Killer and they needed Adam to build it. As soon as Adam announced his plan to leave the Air Force, CORDEX officials signed him to a long-term, no cut contract worth millions over the life of the contract.

He was known as a tough project leader. He could forgive human error, but not incompetence. He told all of the subcontractors’ team leaders and department heads that he expected no one to bring him a problem without at least two options for resolving the problem.

The scuttlebutt around the core was that one young woman heading the water and sewer treatment systems construction forgot about that rule and brought him a problem. After stating the problem, the woman sat staring at Adam. Adam waited for a full minute staring at her and simply said, “And?”

The woman replied, “What do you think we should do about it?”

Adam reached in top desk drawer, pulled out what looked like a schedule and opened it. He scanned it for a moment and flatly stated, “13:30 hours tomorrow.” He closed the document and slowly replaced it in his drawer.

The woman looked confused and asked, “What was that? What do you mean 13:30 tomorrow?” Her confused look actually made Adam feel sorry for her.

Adam sighed and replied, “The shuttle to Earth leaves tomorrow at 13:30 hours. Be on it and don’t come back. I will contact your employer tonight and notify them that your services are no longer required nor wanted.”

That story was told to all personnel arriving in the core area. Once they actually met the man of the story and looked into his piercing eyes, they fully believed the story.

Greg Ballard entered his office and drawled, “Things are going very well. Too well, I think. Murphy and his law must’ve taken this month off.” Greg was Adam’s number-two man. He deflected a lot of tedious minutia from Adam and Adam knew it. He was trustworthy to the bone and was an excellent decision-maker.

Adam had known him most of his adult life. He had worked for Adam at Area 51. When Adam moved to CORDEX to take took over the Storm Killer project he managed to convince Greg to join him. Once Adam understood the nature of Storm Killer he desperately wanted Greg’s participation because of his formal education background.

Greg Ballard was another of those southern gentlemen of which Storm Killer seemed to have in abundance. His slow southern drawl was a counterpoint to Adam’s terse talking style. He had obtained several degrees before he was twenty-two. His last degree, a Masters in Engineering in Polymer and Fiber Science, came from Clemson. He was a member of Storm Killer’s Clemson Alumni group. They met regularly and watched the various closed-circuit sports events together to root for their alma mater.

Adam began reviewing the daily status report with him.

Greg reported that all the project’s defined tasks were completed and the station was ready for operational status. The final tweaking of Storm Killer’s optical and magnification panels was complete, as Adam had witnessed, and the station was now functioning at specified parameters. They noted the time at two hundred hours, ten minutes GMT and logged the completion entry on the project file. They electronically dated and signed the completion certificate, and emailed it to Earth Mission Control and to Brad Bolino, the new Storm Killer Director.

Adam breathed an internal sigh of relief. Now that his part of the project was wrapping up, he could think about spending some quality vacation time with his beloved Arabian horses. 



 

 

 

 

 

 

9

Director Bolino
Brad Bolino was a born and bred southern gentleman that would have been as comfortable in an antebellum southern mansion as he was in a twenty-first century technological wonder. He was an auburn-haired man of stocky build.

Adam pulled his cell phone from his Velcro belt hook. The term ‘cell phone’ was almost a misnomer these days. These communications units, now called Personal Communication Devices, were actually phone, workstation, video camera, and many other devices rolled into a single pocket size unit. While the communications industry called them PCDs, the user community still held on to the archaic term of ‘cell phone’. These ‘cell phones’ were NASA-issued units that were slightly larger than the commercial devices. These had to have a large enough keypad so NASA personnel could manipulate the device to write emails and mission notes, or check engineering drawings and specs while dressed in the clumsy EVA suits with large gloves.

Adam contacted Brad on his cell phone and announced to him that effective at four hundred hours GMT, Brad would assume his role and take over the administration and operation of the station. Brad, as pre-arranged with CORDEX, accepted the transfer of power and requested that Adam and Greg act as his number two and number three staff members for the next forty-five days.

Ballard and Sands verbally accepted the new transition positions and emailed the voice files of their acceptances and congratulations to Brad. While they performed the last administrative duties in the log, Sands chatted with Bolino about current status of the station and systems. Ballard reported that Earth-side weather had reported that Hurricane Edna had risen to a category three storm and was approaching Puerto Rico. Landfall was expected in the next forty-eight hours.  

This storm met all the criteria established by NASA and Washington. The criteria called for a storm that was ninety percent certain to only hit the United States. Other criteria were that the storm would be no more than a category three, and its projected path would take it over a specific section of the Atlantic Ocean where no inhabited islands existed.

Mexico, Costa Rico, and Guatemala had jointly filed strong objections with the United Nations and Washington to “any man made influences on any tropical storm that could potentially impact the sovereign territory of our countries.” These countries were concerned that Storm Killer would fail and cause even more destructive storms that could devastate their coasts. They were calling for a complete ban on full testing against any storms until such time as the scientific community had undisputable empirical evidence as to the possible effectiveness of the Storm Killer technology.

The three countries were involved in intense maneuvering at the United Nations in an attempt to force an emergency session of the Security Council. They were pleading for a resolution, pressuring the United States to cease the operations of Storm Killer until an international scientific committee could render an opinion on Storm Killer’s intended use.

Washington was attempting to stop the Security Council meeting but there seemed to be a ground swell of protesting nations. Therefore, Washington had established criteria that only storms tracking toward the east coast of the United States with more than a ninety percent probability of hitting it would be initial candidates for Storm Killer tests. 

If pushed into a Security Council meeting, the U.S. ambassador could show the members the criteria and hopefully quash any vote from being taken. The entire team on Storm Killer had been made aware of this when Washington had decided on this particular course of action. 

Adam grinned and glancing at his watch replied, “That’s okay. If what the eggheads say will happen happens, in a little less than sixteen hours we kill Edna. Or, we could destroy Florida, and become the poster child for Central America’s concerns.”



 

 

 

 

 

 

10

Conspiracy
The man was sitting at his workstation in his quarters reading the email announcing the completion of the station. A thin smile pulled at the corners of his mouth as he finished reading.

He unhooked the phone from his belt and pressed a speed dial. He unconsciously reached for a pencil and began doodling on a piece of paper as he waited for his call to go through. The NASA mobile phone system worked everywhere. It even worked twenty-four thousand miles above the Earth’s surface.

It was just another technological wonder taken for granted by its users. Of course, these users were now housed in the world’s latest technological marvel.

The call connected with a subtle click being heard by the caller.

A voice said, “Yes?”

“Doctor, the thing is done. Adam Sand will be turning it over, in operational status, to the named long-term management team in a few minutes,” the man reported.

“Alright, my boy, please initiate our disruption plan at once,” the voice ordered.

“Yes, sir. I’ll have our mutual friend get his operative to start the crisis immediately.”

“Good. I’m sure our employers will be glad to hear things have gone awry,” the voice said, chuckling out loud.

“You’ll hear from me soon on how we’re doing at messin’ things up. I have to go to the turnover meeting now,” said the man as he stopped doodling on the paper in front of him. He keyed the phone off and replaced it in his belt as he stood up from the workstation.

He turned to the door and began walking to the management turnover meeting as the Adam Sand email had indicated. He hummed to himself and smiled as he walked briskly to the command center complex. Nobody has a clue what’s about to happen. I do believe we’ve pulled it off!

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 
11
Incident
Storm Killer’s northern hub airlock was empty and inactive. The last extra-station work crew had re-entered the station at the southern hub airlock twenty minutes earlier. No one was around the northern hub at this hour.

The two indicator lamps above the keypad glowed yellow showing the airlock cycling was in idle status and both the inner and outer doors were secure.

In dead silence, the indicator lamp for the inner door changed to red as the inner door slid open three centimeters. Ten seconds later, the lamp flashed to green.

The airlock was suddenly filled with a deafening sound of air rushing out into space as the outer door slid open even when the outer door lamp flashed to green.

Something was amiss. The computer was designed to detect when the inner door was ajar and not allow the outer door to open. Two green lights meant the computer thought the doors were closed.

Storm killer’s designers had taken no chances with possibilities of computer or door sensor failures in the air lock system. They had built in a decompression sensor that alerted a backup computer system when the airlock was malfunctioning. This backup system performed as it was designed.

An emergency icon displayed and began blinking on the engineering console at the control center. The icon blinked on the screen over the picture of the airlock. Banner text ran beneath the icon reading, “Airlock failure – Northern Hub.” Simultaneously, the computer activated the station’s emergency condition sirens.

The engineering duty officer read the banner. He pulled up a live picture of the airlock on his computer monitor. His eyes widened as he saw both airlock doors open. Loose objects were being sucked out the airlock. Papers and debris were swirling through the airlock into the emptiness of space. The station’s precious oxygen supply was bleeding away!

He keyed the communications pad on his desk and raised Greg Ballard on his cell.

Greg answered, “Ballard! What the heck are the sirens about?”

The duty officer replied, “Northern hub airlock is open on both sides. The alarm is the decompression alert.”

Ballard responded, “The airlock is open on both sides? That can’t happen! What the hell kind of SNAFU is this?”

He made a snap decision and order the engineering duty officer, “Get the meteor strike repair crew up there. We may have to seal off the inner door.”

He jumped in his cart and raced to the hub elevator access point for this quadrant. He would be first on the scene unless some poor SOB was accidentally caught near that airlock. Anyone near there could be dead from lack of oxygen by now. God, I hope no one’s hurt, he thought, as he leaped on the elevator and pushed the ‘up’ button.



 

 

 

 

 

 

12

User
Kim Danby had taken a hot shower. Her short bowl-cut brown hair was towel dried. She combed through the tangled hair as she looked in the mirror and wondered. Why am I here? Nothing ever happens up here and I’m a physical and emotional wreck. With that thought, she grabbed her lower back and winced.

The old injuries from the Los Angeles riot just would not heal completely. Not only had her physical injuries not healed, neither had her mental ones.

She sighed and reached into the drawer of her washstand. She pulled out a small black leather case. She sat on the edge of the bed, unzipped the case and laid the contents out next to her.

She lifted a small vial and looked at it. About twenty CCs of cocaine hydrochloride and water mixture were left in the vial. I’ll have to mix a new batch soon, she thought.

She pulled a syringe from the bag, affixed a needle, and carefully filled it from the vial. She grabbed the large rubber tubing from the bag and using her mouth and right hand tied it tightly around her left arm. Slapping her arm a few times to raise the vein, she quickly plunged the needle in and injected herself.

She lay back on the bed and sighed again. Only a few minutes now. Only a few minutes and I’ll get some relief, she thought as she waited for the euphoric feeling from the drug to kick in.

She’d become hooked on cocaine during her recovery from the life threatening injuries sustained from the madmen who had killed her family and abused her in the riot. Whole groups of disenfranchised rioters from various ethnic backgrounds had, en mass, rioted across the country when the INS began a serious effort to deport the millions of illegal immigrants. Some riots had ended quickly with only property damage. Other riots had become extremely violent, as the one in Los Angeles, where she had lived with her family.

During her hospital stay, she had become dependent on morphine. Her doctors had weaned her from the drug and thought she was free of its effects. She hid from them that she had started regularly visiting a local drug dealer buying drugs of ever-increasing potency.

She’d tried several common drugs plus several designer drugs before settling on cocaine. Cocaine gave her a euphoric feeling and deadened the pain from her old injuries. She also seemed to get a jolt of fresh energy after using the drug. She was careful not to abuse it. She only used it when the physical pain or life’s pressures became too great.

Today’s one of those painful days, she convinced herself as the solution had disappeared into her vein.

She did without the support the drugs gave her for several months twice in her life, the first time was when she joined the police department and had to pass a drug test. The second was when she had joined CORDEX security and had to pass yet another drug test. Neither organization did random testing after hire. Nor did NASA require random testing. So once she passed the hiring phase, she felt it was safe to go back to using.

She sighed again as the wonderful euphoric feeling descended over her very soul. She lay quietly for a few minutes appreciating the warm feeling and the rush of energy.

She jumped up, put the paraphernalia in its leather case and placed the case back in her drawer.

She wasn’t worried about needing another fix today. If and when that happened, she had another small black bag in her office desk. Just a quick trip to the lady’s room and she would be good to go again.

She hummed a tune as she exited her quarters and headed back to work.

     

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

13

Buoy 41040
NOAA’s National Data Buoy Center buoy number 41040 was moored in the Atlantic Ocean one thousand kilometers east of island of Martinique.   

The buoy was a six by twelve meter aluminum platform with two carbon-steel masts of weather sensors and transmission antennas projecting six meters into the air. 

It was a bright yellow object easily seen by ships. It was easily seen in good weather, but, today, the buoy was invisible from only two hundred meters distance. 

Hurricane Edna raged around buoy 41040.  Wave crests approaching thirty meters were straining the tether, threatening the connection of the buoy to the anchor resting on the sea floor.  

The waves were freaks caused by combination of factors. Edna was moving very slowly westward and had one hundred and twenty KPH winds that caused a long buildup of wave action. An ocean current moving eastward was opposing the storm’s fetch. These factors were causing the monster waves pounding buoy 41040.   

Buoy 41040 was sending a signal to National Data Buoy Center saying “I’ve got something interesting here!” The NDBC acknowledge the alert and sent a request to collect real time data from the little buoy’s sensor array. 

41040 began sending the data when the tether snapped. Power for the little buoy came from three sources. The first was its internal battery. This battery was charged and the systems run by solar energy when the sun was out and by a special power generation feature of the tether. The temperature difference between the deep ocean and the surface was sufficient to generate a sizable electric current using an ammonia vaporization process. Cold ocean floor water was brought to the surface to cool the ammonia. This power generation plumbing system was integral to the tether and when the tether snapped, the system failed. Since there was no sun for solar support because of Edna’s deep cloud cover, 41040’s battery had to supply the entire electrical demand of the buoy’s various systems. 

NOAA was another government agency running on a less than an adequate budget. Maintenance of the buoys was months behind schedule. 41040’s battery was at the end of its useful life. It should have been able to supply power for thirty hours, but the power reserve was less than one hour. 

41040’s onboard computer detected the system failures, noted that the battery life was falling quickly and made a programmed decision to shutdown. This would leave power for the locator beacon signal that would allow NOAA to find the now helpless, drifting buoy after the storm passed.    

During its brief exchange of weather data, 41040 had reported that, indeed, Edna was now a strong Category Three hurricane with some uniquely large waves. 41040 had accomplished its mission before it went to sleep. 



 

 

 

 

 

 

14

Deal With It
At 0415 hours, Brad Bolino began his first senior staff meeting since assuming authority of the station. His southern drawl was in some ways a welcome change to Adam’s terse New York accent. Brad scanned the conference table and saw a senior staff whose most senior member was only forty years old. Brad himself was only forty-two, which was the upper limit by current NASA standards for long-term orbital crew.

Brad sneezed and stopped to wipe his nose with a tissue. One of the assembled staff members volunteered, “Damn bad time to come down with a cold. You’d best ask Dr. Cruz for one of her snakebite remedies.”

Brad nodded his head in reply and he again wiped his nose.

The assembled senior staff averaged thirty-three years of age. None had been in orbit prior to this mission. Based on existing regulations, they would have to rotate to ground duty every twelve months to avoid long term damage caused by hard radiation received while in orbit. Brad had only arrived the previous month and still had eleven months before his forced rotation. Others of the staff would be rotating Earth-side starting in about four months time.

“Ladies and gentlemen, y’all are now formally on notice that I’ve accepted command and administrative control of this gadget,” stated Bolino, swinging his arm around the room to emphasize the ‘gadget’ was the entire Storm Killer station. “For now, as per the documented plan, y’all now report to me through Adam. Over the next forty-five days, the full transition to my hands will occur.”

The staff nodded their heads in agreement. The senior staff present at the table included all department heads save one, and Bolino and Sands. Greg Ballard had been at the table but had received an urgent request to come to the environmental control center about some problem they were having.

Doctor Francine Cruz, the station’s attractive, auburn-haired physician from Mexico laughed, “Bradley, the entire medical department is at your service.” This brought laughs from the assembled staff members since Francine’s ‘department’ consisted of only herself and her RN nursing assistant.

Brad smiled at her and asked, “What have you got in your bag of tricks for a cold?”

Francine placed her hand on his brow and after a moment said, “I don’t think you have a fever. Stop by the infirmary and I’ll check you out and give you one of my witches brews.”

Reginald O’Donnell, the elected head of the sixty man science team, stood up and called for attention. He raised his Styrofoam coffee cup and, in his best attempt at a Scottish brogue, requested of the assembled personnel, “Lads and Lassies, allow me to offer a proper toast to our defunct project manager, Mr. Adam Sand, for his devotion, professionalism, and personal drive that brought Storm Killer to operational status one month early.” He took a sip of the tepid coffee as the audience clapped for Adam who appeared slightly embarrassed by the praise.

Layne Bartlett, the head of Storm Killer’s Command And Control Center, raised his own cup of warm tea and stated, “Yes, let’s thank Adam for bringing Storm Killer online just in time to assault Hurricane Edna. I was concerned we would come online and have to wait around for a storm to kill. Now we get to tackle one within a few hours of going to operational status! As my mama used to say, “Y’all are sittin’ in the catbird seat.””

Layne was another of those southern gentlemen. He had been born close to Brad’s home and had been friends with him since grade school days. They had attended the University of Alabama together as undergraduates and then Clemson for their PhDs in physics. Bartlett had beaten Brad in overall grades. Now Brad was to be his superior on Storm Killer. They were old friends and Layne was ecstatic about his childhood friend’s success.

The other department heads nodded concurrence and again applauded Adam. At that moment, a quavering wailing sound filled the room. It was the environmental alert siren signaling a life support emergency to all Storm Killer inhabitants.

Storm Killer had been operational for only two hours when this first serious glitch surfaced. At the instant the siren sounded, Greg Ballard paged Adam. “Adam Sand, pick up on channel three. Emergency, pick up!”

Adam pulled his cell from his pocket and toggled to channel 3. He could barely make out what Ballard was shouting. The video feed was turned off on Ballard’s cell so Adam was forced to rely entirely on Greg’s voice. “Air lock…(hiss)... Problem… (squeal)... Oxygen…(static)...Forty minutes,” was all Adam could make out from the overdriven audio circuit caused by Ballard’s shouting into the cell phone.

“Whoa, boy. Calm down. Lower your voice a few hundred decibels so I can understand you!” ordered Adam into his cell.

“Give me a second, Adam,” Greg yelled back. Adam heard a whooshing sound through the open communication channel. He then thought he heard the sound of a door sliding open and then a second later sliding closed.

“Adam, can you hear better me now?” asked Ballard. He had also flipped the video on and Adam could see a tense look on Ballard’s face.

“Yes, now what’s the emergency?” responded Adam.

Ballard began describing the situation in a very hurried manner. He was talking at a word rate many times faster than his normal slow, sure style.

Adam interrupted him, “Greg, slow down! I never heard you talk this fast before. I can’t even get the gist of what you are trying to tell me.”

Greg stopped talking, took a few deep breaths and began again.

Brad had crowded in close to view Adam’s cell and listen in on the conversation. Brad waved to Layne, the closest department head, to approach. Writing a short note from the notebook he always kept in his back pocket, he handed it to Layne without saying a word. The note read simply, “Turn off the damned alarm. I can’t hear a thing.” Layne picked up the conference room phone to take care of the order.

Greg spoke in a normal voice now, “Sorry I had to yell, but the air rushing out of the airlock is making one hell of a racket. We seem to have a situation with the airlock that cannot occur according to the technical guys. The airlock doors are partially open on both sides. Theoretically, this isn’t possible. The control software and hardware have triple redundant systems and the inner door should not open if either the outer door is not closed and locked, or air pressure in the lock is not equal to the interior pressure. I really don’t understand how this….”

Adam immediately interrupted and asked, “Greg, how much time do we have?”

Greg responded, “We have about forty minutes before the air supply and reserves hit critical levels. Listen, we’re dealing with a one-inch gap in the inner door. If we can seal off the door, we can salvage this situation. I’ve sent for the meteor seal machine and we’ll attempt to build a seal to fit gap in the door.”

“Get your repair guys into environmental suits and then close off the reception section of the station,” ordered Adam as Brad nodded to him to take command of the situation.

“Well, boss, we would, but we can’t. Whatever has hosed up the air lock systems has also locked out the controls for the hull breach doors in this whole area of the station. The environmental guys think something has happened in the computer hardware because the two sub-processors that deal with these two control systems are physically side-by-side inside the frame. The computer systems are not responding to diagnostics the techs are trying to run. It will take them a few more minutes to get inside the hardware to inspect these sub-processors.”

Adam told Greg to proceed with his repair plan and that he was on his way to the airlock. With that, he signed off and turned to Bolino. “Brad, do you want to add anything or issue other orders? After all, she’s your station now.”

Brad shook his head, “Do what y’all have to do to stop the leak. I’ll take the lead on finding out what’s hosed up with the computer systems.” 

The emergency sirens ceased their wailing just as Brad added, “And I want everyone to put on their environmental suits or go to their closets.”

The emergency life support safe areas were not really closets, but were more like small kitchenette apartments with self-contained life support systems.

Storm Killer inhabitants were required to frequently rehearse environmental emergencies and go to their pre-assigned safe areas. When filled with the assigned dozen personnel, the residents said it felt like they were in a closet. Thus the name stuck. There were thirty such ‘closets’ strategically located around Storm Killer. So if one could not get to his or her pre-assigned closet, they could go to the nearest ‘spare’ unassigned closet.

Adam quickly retraced the route to the elevator he had recently used and took it back toward the airlock known as Reception. At the top of the elevator, a power sled was tied to the railing. It slowly rotated on its bi-polymer yarn anchor rope in concert with the spin of the station.

The rope was thirty-five percent stronger than the previously used standard polypropylene fiber rope. They had adopted using this style rope after a tied up thousand kilo web rod section had broken away during the early construction phase. This new rope was almost impossible to cut with anything other than a laser knife.

A single insignia on the sled’s cowling denoted it as the environmental department’s meteor strike emergency vehicle. Greg has been on the ball as usual, thought Sand. The sealing equipment was already at the site of the event.

As Adam approached the airlock area, he heard the roaring as the air was being sucked out into empty space. Even as he neared the airlock door, there was a distinct diminishing in the roaring sound of the escaping air.

Ballard was standing behind two technicians as they applied the final portion of the sealing material across the bottom half-meter gap in the airlock door.

They had a large hydraulic arm with a half-meter pan to accept the prepared sealing material. This material was a variation on the same bi-polymer yarn used on the power sled anchor rope. The reverse side of the material was an epoxy adhesive product that activated when an aerosol spray was applied.

The technicians had just completed the aerosol process and were using the hydraulic arm to place the repair seal into the door gap. There was no way the technicians could have hand-applied such a large seal against the tremendous air pressure in the gap.

As the seal sank into place, it ballooned slightly inward, and the roaring sound ceased. The emergency portion of the event was over. Now, the cleanup and correction actions would start.

Adam contacted Bolino on the executive channel, “Brad, it’s under control. Issue the all clear.”

“I’ve got the crew started on Storm Killer systems diagnostics and are having them continue the scheduled demise of Hurricane Edna. They need to be busy and not have time to think about the causes of this incident,” Bolino replied and then broke the circuit.

Adam motioned to Greg to follow him and they headed back to central core to begin the investigation on what went wrong and how to correct it. Hopefully, Bolino was already well on his way to determining what had gone wrong.



 

 

 

 

 

 

15 

Storm Killer Lives
Seen from a distance, the dumbbell, with its hundreds of acres of the four shimmering optical film webs, appeared to hang over the east coast of the United States.

The webs were slowly extending to their full four thousand meter length. The use of carbon filament rods could only provide part of the structural support. No lightweight material known could be made long enough with sufficient strength to handle the webs at their full deployment.

The Storm Killer designers had implemented an ingenious solution. The rods simply stored the optical film mesh as a Roman blind stores the material when the blind is open. At the end of structural support rod was a box-like structure. In this box, attached to the wire, was a small device about five meters by ten meters. This machine looked almost exactly the same as the Personal Propulsion Units, or PPUs, used by the crews working outside the dumbbell.

Attached to the wire every half-meter was a fold of the magnifying film material lying tightly bunched along the length of the support rod. The wire ran through the support rods to huge power take up reels that could hold up to ten thousand meters of the ultra-thin wire.

The wire’s SKID unit was a specialized PPU. SKID stood for “Station Keeping and Independent Deployment Unit”. The SKID housed an ultra fast, super powerful computer that controlled the unit’s hydrogen powered deployment engines and position holding jets. This computer was tied into the core’s central mainframe that directed the entire deployment and station keeping procedure. The onboard computer ensured the adherence to the master computer’s commands by real time checking of its current coordinates against the planned position.

The fully deployed, eight-thousand-meter configuration of film on each of the two rows was considered the optimum surface and magnifying power required for the platform’s planned mission.

The concept of Storm Killer was extremely simple. Hurricanes and typhoons are spawned when warm seawater feeds upward moving air currents that rapidly rise into the colder air many thousands of feet above sea level. This process accelerates until the storm eventually hits land and loses its warm water supply of energy.

Since it was impossible to affect the supply of warm water, what if one could affect the temperatures of the upper air levels? What if one could warm the upper air until it was almost the same temperature as the lower air? 

What if one could harness the sun to accomplish this?

The reasoning went that this temperature increase would cause the upward circulation of air to slow or cease.

At least that was the theory. CORDEX’s own models, as well as the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s weather models seemed to support the theory.

The insurance companies, underwriters, and reinsurance providers believed in its potential, and had supported CORDEX and NOAA in their efforts to interest NASA and the United States Congress, since the government was the only entity with deep enough pockets to afford to build the proposed hurricane killer. After the disastrous Gulf Coast storm events in first decade of the twenty-first century, both the insurance companies and the federal government were looking for relatively cheap solutions to avoid the hundreds of billions of dollars paid out to rebuild the ruined regions.

The theory went, that after the hurricane had formed and developed an eye wall, Storm Killer could target the topmost cloud layers of the eye wall and hopefully raise the air temperature by heating these water-laden clouds.

This rise of temperature would lower the heat gradient between the upper and lower levels of the atmosphere and cause the storm to loose its energy generation capacity.

The topmost web of optical film was back embossed with a micro-prismatic reflective film similar to the kind currently used in traffic road signs. This film provided a highly reflective surface that made this web a superb mirror. This web collected the sunlight, magnified it, and bounced the light back through the other three magnification layers of webs.

By varying the configuration of the four sets of optical film webs in the dumbbell, the intensely magnified sunlight could be targeted to a pinpoint of focused energy only ten meters in diameter. At such a setting, the intense heat could burn through a steel armor plate one meter thick in less than two seconds. It could also be adjusted to a wide dispersal area over three kilometers in diameter. In this configuration, one billion kilos of water vapor could be increased in temperature by one degree centigrade every hour. By focusing the beam on the upper eye wall for twelve to twenty-four hours, the hurricane should weaken and collapse from the short-circuited natural heat transfer by decreasing the temperature gradient.

Of course, if Storm Killer missed the correct target point, it could actually be heating the sea-level water. Although this heating would take longer, the NOAA models indicated that an increase of one degree in the seawater could increase the storm by one full category on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

The implications of this technology were huge. The Department of Defense was looking at it as a possible weapon, and, in fact, a smaller but more powerful prototype using six synchronized optical webs was already being tested in a secret polar orbit. Some think tanks were looking into it as a possible way to light urban areas at night.

The webs were now deployed to their operational length. The SKIDs appeared to be doing an admirable job of keeping the webs aligned with the station and with each other. The station would be in the correct position with the sun and the earth in exactly forty-seven minutes. At that point, Storm Killer would be trained on Hurricane Edna and the world would change forever.

Storm Killer lived and awaited her first kill.



 

 

 

 

 

 

16

On The Surface
The United States Navy had blockaded the western one-half of the Atlantic waters adjacent to the Caribbean Ocean. All private surface vessels and civilian aircraft had been banned from the area. Several private and commercial ships had been escorted from the area by armed surface warships. The only craft allowed in the area were military and a large contingent of scientific surface vessels.

The scientific community had monitoring stations on board the surface vessels surrounding the hurricane every three degrees of the compass. They were maneuvering as closely as possible to the eye of the storm. The U.S.S. Lincoln was maintaining position two hundred twenty kilometers due west of the storm’s eye wall.

These ships would observe the storm’s center for changes and evaluate the affects of Storm Killer. NASA had grounded the usual flights through the eye wall due to the uncertainty as to what the impacts would be on the aircraft flying through the intense light beam heating the upper atmosphere.

Navy Rear Admiral Charles Olsen stood on the bridge of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, Abraham Lincoln. He could not see beyond the end of the flight deck because of the heavy rain whipped by the almost hurricane force winds of a rogue thunderstorm spawned by Hurricane Edna still so far away. The wind-driven seas were impressive with dark waves of three to four meters, but the huge aircraft carrier barely rolled from their effects. He squinted into the storm-ravaged early morning gloom as he sipped his first coffee of the day.

He saw his reflection in the window glass. What looked back at him was a fit trim man of forty years old. The man was clean-shaven, with piercing blue eyes and a ruddy complexion from spending far too time in the sun.    

The Abraham Lincoln was his flagship for the strange assortment of vessels that made up his ‘fleet.’

Olsen was in command of the fleet of science vessels scattered around the edges of the ever-growing hurricane.

He was an Annapolis graduate with a spotless record of command assignments on various naval vessels. This was his first fleet level assignment where he was responsible for multiple vessels.

His fleet consisted of one hundred and twenty vessels. These vessels were private science research laboratories, and NOAA weather ships, as well as twenty Navy destroyers and frigates stationed at each eighteen degrees of the compass. These navy vessels were the anchors of the observation net and would receive and process weather information from the smaller science vessels. They, in turn, would forward the data across broadband connections to the Abraham Lincoln’s converted ‘war room’. The war room now housed two massive parallel processing computers capable of doing hundreds of millions of calculations per second. The only computer more powerful than these was housed at Fort Meade, Maryland. That was the massive machine built to break any known encryption standard for the National Security Agency.

These two computers would be running multiple models of tropical weather simulations and forecasting. The lead scientists onboard could determine the impact of Storm Killer’s technology on the storm with only a ten-minute delay from real time.

The Admiral reviewed the current plot of the positions of his fleet and nodded his head. “Perfect position. We’re ready to complete our mission!”

Olsen thought to himself with glee, and once this mission is successfully completed, I should make Vice Admiral.

He chuckled happily to himself as he walked off the bridge. Little did he know what awaited his ship and his fleet in the next few hours. If he had, he would have ordered the ship turned and headed for home. But he had no such foreknowledge. He went happily along his way not realizing that death awaited him, his crew, and his ship in less than twenty-four hours.



 

 

 

 

 

 

17

Incident Or Accident
Brad was waiting for them in his office when Adam and Greg arrived at the control center. Brad waved them to a small conference table at one corner of his office and shut the door. Taking his seat, Brad sighed and then looked at the two men sitting opposite him. “This was no accident.”

The two men looked at each other and then back to Brad. “What have you found out?” asked Adam, an alarmed look on his face.

“The techs got to the sub-processors and found the hardware intact, but the both main and backup input feeds had been reversed. The inputs were telling the system that the airlock and reception area doors were closed. This was not an accident. Someone had to manually reverse those circuits,” Bolino reported. “The computer service module was also taken offline so the diagnostics could not execute. This was a planned, coordinated attack that could have killed many and set our timetable back months or even years.”

“What does Security think?” asked Greg.

The “Security” that Greg mentioned was the onboard team of security agents paid for by CORDEX, the prime contractor, but reporting to the office of the NASA Inspector General.

“They agree that this wasn’t any accident and strongly recommended a formal investigation be launched,” Brad responded. “In fact, the most ardent security officer is waiting in the outer office for authorization to commence.”

Adam asked, “Brad, do we have anyone on the station security team that has any criminal investigation experience? We’re certainly out of our depths, unless one of you has a hidden past.”

“I’ve asked myself the same question,” Brad replied. “Yep, our onboard CORDEX security force contains a person who was a detective on the Kansas City Police force prior to joining our project. She’s the one waiting outside. A real ball-buster type.”

“She? Do you mean Kim Danby? What’re her credentials?” queried Greg.

Brad scanned the screen on his personal wristband computer and replied, “Apparently she was hired because of a paper she wrote on dealing with crimes in space. Seems the international nature of our space program leads to some interesting twists and turns in jurisdiction and adjudication. She started out as lawyer and became a police officer after the disenfranchised minorities uprising of ’09. Her family was murdered during the Los Angeles riot that year. The murderers were never caught. She, herself, was badly injured by the perpetrators. Her successfully closed case rate as a cop is over ninety percent.”

Adam smiled and stated, “Kim is going to earn her pay this week. Let’s get her in here and brief her. I suggest we let her run the investigation and get the hell out of her way.” 

To this both declaration, Brad and Greg nodded their head in agreement. Brad added, “She can have what ever she wants and needs on this.”

Adam said,  “Call her in.”

Security Officer Kimberly Danby entered the conference room with no fanfare. She was an above average looking thirty-eight-year-old woman. There was just a hint of gray streaks in her brown hair. She wore no makeup and dressed in the dark blue and white unisex uniform of a CORDEX Security Officer.

She wasted no words and tersely summarized the current situation and then asked for the authorizations to start an immediate investigation. She never smiled nor frowned. She was thoroughly professional and no nonsense in the eyes of the three men.

Adam nodded at Brad. Greg made a thumbs-up sign. Brad moved to his desk and spoke as he was typing on his keypad. “Officer Danby, y’all are hereby authorized to investigate the incident that just occurred and you may utilize any resources of this station in that mission. Adam, Greg, myself, and the various department heads will defer to your experience in this matter and take orders from you related to furthering the investigation. We will continue with our current schedule to begin Storm Killer’s attack on Hurricane Edna while you mount the investigation.”

The laser spit out a formal order from Brad to Kim covering the items he was discussing verbally. This written order was instantly transmitted to the department heads.

Kim took the paper, folded it, and placed it in her pocket. She looked at each man in turn and then simply stated, “Gentlemen, we have a saboteur in our midst. Let’s flush him out.”

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

18

Storm Killer Attacks
On command, Storm Killer slowly turned herself, positioning the reflective web to best capture the unfiltered sunlight of near Earth space.

The three remaining webs of magnifying films began to slowly flutter as the SKIDs worked to move the webs to the optimum-computed positions. At exactly eight hours sixteen minutes ten seconds, all the webs were in perfect alignment. The entire bottom third of Storm Killer was ablaze with backwash white light so bright anyone staring at it for more than a few seconds would be forever blinded. No laser had ever generated such a large intense beam of light.

The brilliant beam of light arched down toward the boiling storm named Edna. Specks of dust trapped in the upper atmosphere sparkled as they almost instantly reached their flash point and boiled away in the intense heat contained in the concentrated sunlight. As the beam traveled the thousands of kilometers to the storm cloud tops, it widened until at the target area, it was a circle of light four kilometers in diameter.

Water vapor within the cone of light and intense heat boiled away and immediately condensed in the super cold air outside the cone. Tremendous quantities of cold rain and ice began to fall into the upper clouds of the hurricane for a distance of three to four kilometers beyond the cone. This cold rain and ice would continue to fall into the storm until Storm Killer stopped its generation of the super concentrated light beam.

The computer projections were that over the next thirty-six hours, the chilling rain and ice would begin to wreck havoc in the hurricane’s weather engine. The super cold rain would penetrate deeper and wider into the storm clouds and moderate the updrafts and downdrafts of air that assisted in generating much of the storm’s energy.

Storm Killer’s positioning thrusters were now commanded to fire, maneuvering the station into a slight circular motion causing a sway of one quarter of a degree in six minutes. The cone of light began to move slowly in a counterclockwise direction around the eye wall. At this rotation speed, the light/heat cone would take two hours to complete the entire circuit around the top of the eye wall.

While the addition of the intense, icy precipitation was a major factor in the projected dissipation of the storm, the overriding factor was the super heating of the upper cloud layers that would cause the temperature gradient from the ground level to the upper level of the storm to decrease by one to one and half degrees centigrade every twelve hours. Sufficient reduction in this temperature gradient would shut down the internal weather engine driving the storm.

Storm Killer would attack the hurricane for nineteen hours a day until the storm showed signs of weakening. The remaining time, it would be in the Earth’s shadow as it and the Earth rotated through the day.

The computers on Storm Killer were continuously calculating and recalculating the angle of the platform and film webs, the speed of the hurricane’s forward motion, and the circular motion required to play the light beam across the entire eye wall. An additional two hundred flight variables were added to the calculations to keep Storm Killer targeted and the full power of the sun focused on the job at hand.

At input variable one hundred and sixty-eight, a decimal point was shifted one position by a worm program hiding in the input processor operating system. At each succeeding input variable, the worm introduced a minor variation.

The controlled oscillation of the platform slowed and the light beam coned straight down into the center of the eye of Edna. As soon as the targeting anomaly was detected, the control center staff began diagnostics to determine the cause of the glitch. Unless something was done quickly, the surface water in the eye of the storm would begin heating which could lead to an even stronger storm being produced.

The worm remained undetected for the first twenty minutes following the start of the anomaly until an astute computer engineer detected a minor mainframe storage increase that was not there in any of the prior system test runs. Once detected, it took less than a minute to introduce and execute a scrubbing program that removed the worm. Control was restored.

Storm Killer continued her attempt to kill Edna.



 

 

 

 

 

 

19 

On The Rabbit’s Trail
Kim wasted no time after receiving authority to launch the investigation into the air lock sabotage. She ordered all memory stick recordings of the security cameras for the entire twenty-four hours prior to the airlock incident to be delivered to the security desk. No camera was located in the exact spot where the sabotage occurred, but the entrances to the computer system rack rooms were covered.

With some legwork and mental prowess, it should prove fairly easy to determine who the probable offender was.

Kim set up a desk within the Control Center building. This allowed her to coordinate the investigation, have immediate access to the department heads, and be able to easily meet with Brad, Adam, and Greg for scheduled status meetings.

They all preferred face-to-face meetings in the Control Center rather than teleconferencing from various sites within the dumbbell. Even with encryption, someone who really wanted to overhear such electronic meetings could break the cipher and listen in.

Until more was known about the criminal or criminals, security measures would stay at the highest levels. 

Currently, Brad, Adam, and Greg were taking shifts to act as a guard at the mainframe computer complex. As personnel cleared interrogation and a rapid but thorough background check by ground-based CORTEX and governmental agencies, they would be assigned to this guard duty. Until then, only the three trusted executive personnel would do the guard duty.

Since Brad had come down with a bad case of the flu, Adam and Greg had split his shift. Brad had gone to Dr. Cruz, was checked out, given a medication, and told to go to bed for twenty-four hours.

Lt. Randall James outranked her, but with the orders written by the Storm Killer Director, Kim assumed full command authority. Lt. James was not happy about this, but he did his duty.

Lt. James had experience and background with electronic surveillance. He’d been an operative from one of the numerous intelligence agencies that had sprung up in the years following the earliest terrorists attacks in the United States. His special area of expertise was electronic surveillance. He had perfected this skill spying upon the various radical organizations in the western United States.

He’d left the intelligence organization after what most people called the ‘Waco II incident of ’15 occurred. He’d never been able to shake the feeling of guilt in his role in the death of all of those people.

Even though his role had been minor and he had not raised a weapon against them, he was haunted by the cold, calculated way his field commander had ordered the death of over sixty save-the-Earth cult members whose only apparent crimes were failure to pay taxes and possession of a small cache of ancient automatic rifles that no longer worked.

He was already hard at work reviewing the sticks’ memory using computer technology that scanned each recording and only displayed images when movement was detected. Each recorded scene of movement was being copied to a chronological file by location.

The third member of the Storm Killer security team was Dan Hoch, a strapping six foot six inch shaven head former beat cop from New Orleans. He had resigned from the police department after the televised beating of an elderly man after Hurricane Katrina had devastated the city. He had participated in that incident much to his sorrow.

After Katrina, he had lost his home and young family to the floods. He worked over two weeks with only a few hours of sleep. The pain and hurt in his life had welled up in him until finally, just like New Orleans’ levees, his mental levee had broken. He snapped and, with the three other police officers at the scene, had beaten the man, causing extensive internal injuries and broken bones.

After lengthy therapy, he understood his loss and his fragile mental state. He went to the man he had beaten to apologize and seek his forgiveness. The man had looked at Hoch and saw his anguish. He raised a hand to stop Hoch in the middle of his apology and simple said, “Be well. Go, my brother, and do some good.” The man had dropped the charges pending against Hoch. The police department had allowed Hoch to resign with nothing being placed on his immaculate record. After a lengthy rehab period, Hoch felt he was ready to ‘do some good’ and sought employment with CORDEX security.

Hoch had investigated several warehouse pilfering cases and had been key in breaking up an international ring of thieves responsible for millions of dollars in lost warehouse assets belonging to a number of large corporations.

He had been astonished when CORDEX had approached him about taking one of the security positions aboard Storm Killer.

With his shaven head and weightlifter build, most of the contingent on Storm Killer referred to Hoch as “Mr. Clean” from the old TV cleaning detergent commercials. His size alone offered an intimidation factor that many thought important to the Security department.

Hoch was drawing up a working list of those personnel who were on duty during the twenty-four hour period. This list would be used to verify the recorded images of those authorized to be in the area. These would be the first people interrogated. If their stories proved true, the people listed who were in the area for no authorized reason would be detained and interrogated.

Hoch had already set up a containment area in one of the twenty-man dormitory areas that had been used to house some of the recently departed construction personnel. The dormitory was a separate module that had a cycling hatch that could be locked. The dormitory was to have been jettisoned after the construction crew departed, but it now would serve as a temporary jail facility. Only Hoch had the newly entered access codes that opened and closed the dorm’s hatch door.

Just as Kim began to feel she had the investigation moving along well, the second attack on Storm Killer occurred.



 

 

 

 

 

 

20

Incident Re Dux
The department heads were in attendance at the emergency meeting called by Kim to review the latest effort by the saboteurs. She now believed there was more than one person involved. No one who had been identified as nearing the computer complex around the time of the airlock incident was anywhere near the three workstations identified as the only ones capable of allowing a worm to be introduced to the system.

This information she gave to the station executives at the emergency meeting. She was interrupted by Brad’s fit of coughing and sneezing.

“Damn. Sorry, Kim. I went to the doctor’s office and got a vile potion she guaranteed would cure me quickly. I took it last night, went out like a light, and actually feel much better today,” Brad apologized with a raspy voice.

The technician who had found and removed the worm was being used as the computer forensics expert in Kim’s investigation. Kim deduced that if this tech had introduced the worm, he would have done everything he could to hide its existence. Instead, he had detected it and removed it quickly enough to avoid it doing serious damage.

The technician reported that only the three identified workstations had the security access levels required to get to the system location the worm had inhabited and they were the only ones with external memory stick readers. These readers would have been required to allow the perpetrator to download the worm program into the system.

He’d initially reported that only a knowledgeable computer person could have gotten around the login and activity logs, as was apparently the case. No suspicious activity had been found in the logs. But then the tech also noted that the created date of login and activity log files did not match that of the other logs in this part of the system. The entire set of log files should have all been initially created at the same time. But these two logs carried a creation date and time stamp exactly matching the time of the worm introduction.

These logs had been intentionally altered at the time of the worm’s introduction! Very poor cover up attempt, opinioned the computer tech. He now changed his previous opinion and stated that the perpetrator was probably rather naïve about computers and was more than likely just following a simple set of instructions provided to them.

At the time of the guidance system incident, the technician had commanded the computer to freeze its memory and not reuse any memory that had recently been used and released back to the system. The tech had done a copy dump of the entire memory and he was now manually reviewing the contents of each piece of frozen storage from around the time of the log file alterations.

The worm was very simplistic and had no programmed startup timers or event triggers. The worm had become active as soon as it was introduced to the system. This meant that the worm had been introduced within milliseconds of the first guidance system variances being noticed in Storm Killer’s guidance system.

Even with such a narrow timeline of the worm introduction and the limited number of input stations, the tech had to go through several thousand pieces of frozen memory storage.

Kim was frustrated. The evidence from the first incident was still incomplete and now the second sabotage attempt had stopped all progress by her team. They were now busy gathering evidence from the second attempt and had placed the evaluation of the evidence from the first attempt on hold.

Kim was awaiting a report from Hoch on fingerprint matches from the prints lifted from the three computer workstations. It would go much quicker if they knew which workstation the saboteurs had used. There were a hundred different prints on each workstation. Some of these prints were from people no longer on the station.

“From the number of prints we have found, I doubt the cleaning crew has ever cleaned any of the workstations,” Kim muttered to herself. Apparently, the cleaning crew did not adhere to the checklist item on wiping down the workstations each night. Kim made a mental note to herself to start carrying antibacterial wipes and use them every time she touched a computer pad in the public areas.

“Uh, Ms. Danby, uh, this looks like something,” the tech pointed excitedly at the screen. Kim walked over to tech’s desk and looked over his shoulder. “What have you got?”

“This appears to be the true log in file.” The tech browsed down the image until he came to the log in entries around the time the system variations started. His eyes widened as he pointed to the entry time stamped just fifteen seconds before the worm first appeared.

Kim couldn’t believe the name that appeared. The screen read:


LOGIN TERMASD1 08/21/29 TIME 08163108GMT   ACCESS CLASS EXEC USERID=BBOLINO
Brad Bolino? What the hell is going on here? Kim thought to herself. She grabbed the tech’s shoulder and squeezed saying, “Keep this information to yourself until I tell you what to do, OK?”

“Yes, certainly,” the tech replied looking scared and confused.

“Which workstation is it from?” she asked.

“The workstation in hydroponics.”

Kim touched the intercom button on the cell phone attached to her waist and spoke, “Hoch? It’s the workstation in hydroponics. Back burner the other workstations’ prints and focus on those from that specific workstation. Report your findings to me and me alone. Danby out.”

Lt. James strode into the work area carrying a memory stick. “Well, Danby, are you still happy you went behind my back and stole command of this investigation from me? No need, to reply, I know you are.“

Kim started to reply and defend herself, but Lt. James raised his hand, waved her off and continued. “I finished the surveillance analysis. Nobody who should not have been there entered or exited the area around the mainframe during the airlock incident. Except for Dr. Cruz. She had been called to that location by a reported possible electrocution. Apparently, one of the techs had come in contact with a live wire while installing a new air handler for cooling the mainframe.“

“I don’t believe in coincidence, do you, Lieutenant?” Kim asked. “An electrocution in the area right around the time of the sabotage? Who was the tech?”

“A Rafael Denuza, a general maintenance engineer from Southern California,” Lt. James replied. “He has nothing in his background to suggest he had any motive for this. Dr. Cruz’s report states Denuza had suffered minor burns and was having some difficulty breathing when she arrived and it took her about twenty minutes to ensure he was stable and out of danger.”

“Who else was there with them during this time?” Kim asked.

“Well, another tech, Alfred Mooney, was there for a few minutes, but Dr. Cruz sent him to get a oxygen tank from the Doctor’s emergency sled. He was gone for about five minutes. The camera verified he did indeed come out and get a portable O2 bottle from the sled. He apparently had a tough time getting the bottle out of the sled. The bottle’s strap was wrapped around the handle of the emergency stretcher. He was on camera for about two minutes.”

“So, we have three suspects. We have Mooney, who we can verify only two minutes of his absent five minutes. We have Denuza and Dr. Cruz who appear to corroborate each other’s stories, but were alone with no witnesses for about five minutes. Did we get any prints from the reversed input feeds?”

“No prints. But I found a trace of a white powder on two of the wires. I packaged a sample and sent it down on the shuttle last night. Ground Control should be getting a report from the FBI lab later today,” Lt. James reported.

Kim filled him in on the latest information she had. 

After the quick briefing, he stood up, heading toward the door. “The camera in hydroponics was reported out of order, so I don’t think we’ll get any video of our culprit. Convenient time to have camera problems, don’t you think? And a very interesting coincidence that the workstation used was in the only area with a known camera problem. I’m going to have Hoch look at the entire workstation area in hydroponics and see if he can find anything. While he does that, I’m going to be checking the broken camera. That is just too much of a coincidence for me.”

He stopped, turned around, and snarled, “I would assume you are going to pursue the Bolino evidence, so good luck. I would hate to be accusing the Station Director of sabotaging his own station. I think you’re in over your head, lady, and I hope I’m around when the axe falls.” He left the room.

Kim had developed a mild crush on the lieutenant. He had always treated her with utmost respect and kindness. He was a very attractive man in Kim’s eyes. They had become close friends and they shared many private thoughts with each other. Kim had always respected his senior rank and, in public, rarely called him anything other than lieutenant.

Kim watched him walk out and sighed thinking, He may be right. Maybe I was too aggressive taking command of this. He is really ticked at me. But he is a professional and is doing a good job. Maybe, when this is over, I can repair our relationship. He really is a fine man! 

She thought back to her first meeting with Lt. James five years ago.



 

 

 

 

 

 

21

Five Years Before; Introduced To The Beast
CORDEX had spent mountains of dollars and years of time pushing through the Storm Killer proposal. 

They, at first, had needed to convince the insurance industry that Storm Killer had the potential to greatly reduce, or even eliminate, destruction and damage caused by tropical storms. 

     Once the insurance industry was solidly behind the proposal, they had to jointly convince the United States Congress and two different administrations that Storm Killer was feasible and that the required technology existed already. The final obstacle was establishing a multi-hundred billion dollar project was a reasonable cost when compared to the long-term benefits.    

Congress first began listening after Hurricane Katrina all but annihilated New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast. Even now, years later, the city was just a ghost of its former vibrant self.  

But it wasn’t until Hurricane Wynona in the decade following Katrina that Congress and the prior administration was finally convinced to act. 

     The Florida cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater no longer existed. At least, they no longer existed as they had prior to Wynona. Now, they existed as small villages scattered among large swatches of flattened piles of rubble that had been office buildings, retail businesses, and homes.

Wynona had hit at the worst possible time. She had churned ashore at celestial high tide. The moon and sun were at their closest positions to Earth and aligned at the new moon phase when Wynona made land. This alignment caused the unusual high tide of ninety centimeters. The storm surge came on top of this high tide.  

St. Petersburg and Clearwater were on a peninsula separating Tampa Bay from the Gulf of Mexico. The peninsula was lined by a string of barrier islands down the entire length of the west coast. These islands were where such well-known beach communities as Clearwater Beach, Madeira, Indian Rocks, Indian Shores, Treasure Island and St. Petersburg Beach were located.   

Tampa was located due east of Clearwater across the bay at a distance of about twenty kilometers.

Wynona was an immense storm and fed off the hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico. She had achieved category five status a full day before landfall. Her eye came ashore a ten kilometers south of Tarpon Springs, just north of Clearwater, was an old town that had hosted a fleet of sponge boats.

The early sponge industry created a need for eating-places at the docks for the boat crews. Soon, as news of this unusual industry spread, people began to come to the docks of Tarpon Springs to see the sponges brought in. Shops opened so that the tourists could purchase sponges and other souvenirs.  Some of the original shops and restaurants were still in operation when Wynona struck, owned by the same families that started them. 

The series of tornadoes accompanying the eye wall had flattened Tarpon Springs and the dock area was reverting a marshland as the remaining debris slowly sank into the water.

Because of the eye’s landing site, the storm surge was blown directly through the mouth of Tampa Bay. Billions of decaliters of seawater poured through the narrow mouth of the bay. And the immense storm surge and the high tide caused Wynona to push water up and over the seawalls of lower St. Petersburg.   At the storm’s height, St Petersburg became an island. The sea cut across the peninsula from Treasure Island to the northeast through Pinellas Park onward to the bay just south of the Courtney-Campbell Causeway. 

A large portion of the west side of Clearwater lay many meters under water. Clearwater Beach no longer existed. Only the top floors of the tallest buildings could seen jutting up out of the water like old Florentine homes in Venice’s canals.  

The barrier islands that lined the peninsula’s west coast ceased to exist for almost twenty-four hours until the filthy waters retreated back into the Gulf of Mexico.  

 Across the bay in Tampa, water poured up and over the city. Even though it was further inland, it suffered the same fate as St. Petersburg. Water stood five meters deep from the edge of the bay all the way to Kennedy Blvd. 

While storm surge is the primary destroyer of property and life, Wynona had a second weapon of mass destruction aimed at the Tampa Bay area, wind. Wynona was known to have spawned over one hundred and fifty tornadoes along the west coast and central Florida. The sustained winds of Wynona were measured at two hundred and twenty-five kilometers and hour. Gusts were over three hundred kilometers an hour. While these winds were destroyers for structures built to pre-Katrina building codes. While the tornadoes leveled most structures built to even the most rigid building codes.   

Buildings that had survived the floods were blown apart by tornadoes and the cyclonic winds. Over five thousand people died as a result of the combined wind and flood damages.

     It was now five years after Wynona and CORDEX was readying their Storm Killer team. It was felt that the team didn’t have a good comprehension of how important their mission would be. If they could kill a hurricane, many lives and many billions of dollars of property damage could be avoided. The CORDEX management decided the only way to give the team the right level of comprehension was to have them actually experience a full fledge hurricane. Of the entire station compliment of one hundred and twenty-eight people, only twenty-eight had actually been in a hurricane. Those twenty-eight were aware of the power of such storms and were sensitive to the desire that Storm Killer succeed in its mission. 

     Over the last two hurricane seasons, the St. Thomas area had been directly hit by three storms of strength of at least category three. The latest forecasts were that the area would be probable for another storm this season.  The odds were also high that the Caymans would be hit. 

     CORDEX made arrangements for housing of the entire team on one of two small islands within both possible storm tracks. 

     In St. Thomas, they rented the facility on Little Saint James Island. This seventy-two acre island had a single set of manmade structures that had been the home of Kevin Costner, the actor. 

The house had been severely damaged by Hurricane Marilyn, a category three storm, in 1995. Now, rebuilt and converted to a very expensive retreat for the rich and famous, it had four separate bedroom pavilions. CORDEX had removed the furniture from the complex and set up a barracks environment with one hundred army cots, a mobile field kitchen and a medical dispenser. The home had satellite TV and radio for staying connected to the outside world. 

     The company’s plan was to airlift the hundred-man team to St. Thomas thirty-six hours before forecasted landfall. From the St. Thomas airport, the whole team would be ferried to the island. 

     And so, on September 1st, one year before Storm Killer was to go operational, the Kim Danby, Lt. Randall James, and Dan Hoch, the designated Storm Killer security team found themselves standing in front of the lone house with ninety-seven other team members watching the ferry boat depart from the island’s single dock.  

     Hurricane Buford was due to hit the island in twenty-eight hours. The eastern skies were already clouding over in the direction Buford approaching storm center. 

     This was the first time all three of the team members had been together. Kim Danby had spent training time with Hoch in Houston, but Lt. James, as the unit’s senior officer, had been at the Cape in Florida establishing the protocols and procedures to be used by his team thousands of miles above the Earth. 

Hoch and Danby were taking the opportunity to size up their team leader. 

Lt. Randall James was a rather striking tall ebony skinned man in his early thirties. His build was one of a man who took care of his body through rigorous exercise. His almond colored eyes gleamed and sparkled with an almost internal brilliance. 

When Kim and Dan had inspected his personnel jacket, his file had not given any background prior to his hiring by CORDEX. All prior history was closed to viewing and simply marked, “Classified, Restricted Access”. 

Kim flashed a smile at him and asked, “What shall we call you? Is Randall alright” 

The lieutenant turned to her and, without any external sign of emotion, replied, “I prefer Lt. James, please. I like to stand on formality Officer Danby.” 

Kim was a little taken back by the seeming unfriendliness of the man. She stuttered a reply, “Yes, sir!”   

With that short exchange the initial ground rules were set. While Kim and Dan shared a more friendly relationship, they treated their commander as simply a superior officer. From that point forward, he was to be known simply as Lieutenant James and addressed that way. 

The security team took up their position in their assigned quarters in the east wing of the house. They would act as the police and security force for the one hundred assembled people during the upcoming exercise of living through a severe hurricane.

The compound was under the nominal command of the proposed management team that the Storm killer station would be turned over to when it was complete and ready for operation.  This executive team called the group together, and doled out assignments for each person in the group. Some would act as cooks, others as hurricane preparation squads, others would inventory the supplies CORDEX had left for their needs, and still others would perform duties related to their skills such as the medical team. One group was dispatched to assemble the mobile communications van and run coaxial cable from the van to the house. This would allow the same team to monitor the TV and radio reports on the storm twenty-four by seven and provide hourly updates to the assembled group on weather conditions and any safety items they felt would be important to the overall group.   

The hurricane preparation squads began to board up the house’s windows and fuel and inspect the twin power generators that provided electricity to the whole facility. Another squad assembled the cots and prepared the bed linens. The medical team established a small infirmary in the room next to the room being used by Lt. James’ security team. 

Prior to bedding down in their respective barracks at the end of the day, Kim and Dan took time to run through their Karate Kata, or forms. The Kata is a series of techniques used to develop strength and posture. Currently they were working on Kata for developing leg strength. Hoch had gotten Kim interested in marital arts and was giving her a two to three hour training session each day.

They were using the patio in front of the pool for their training area.

Lieutenant James had been returning from the portable field latrine when he spied his subordinates ending up their practice session. He noted the grace of movement Kim showed and the raw power obvious in Hoch’s frame. He started to walk toward them when they bowed to each other and picked up their towels. As they began toweling the sweat from their brows, Kim leaned forward and gave Dan a kiss. The lieutenant stopped and rethought his uninvited breaking in on his subordinates’ free time. It appeared that there was more to their relationship than just associates. 

Lt. James thought, As long as they do their jobs in a professional manner, what they do after hours is their own business. With that he turned and walked away leaving Kim and Dan toweling dry. If he had stayed and approached them he might have heard their conversation after the kiss. 

Dan said in a startled voice, “What the hell was that for?”

Kim laughed and replied, “It just a Thank You to a good friend who has introduced me to a wonderful pastime. I love Karate!”

Dan returned the laugh, “Okay. I thought you were coming on to me. Damn girl, while I like you a lot, I don’t like you that way.”

Kim smiled, “I know, Dan. Me, too! You’re not my idea of a romantic interest. Your too much of a beast with all of those muscles for my taste.”  

She continued, “But really Dan, the Kata seems to help reduce the pain in my old injuries.”

Kim turned toward the back of the house and saw Lt. James walking away from them. She thought, I wonder if he saw me kiss Dan? Crap. That’s all I need! To have my boss think I’m having a relationship with my work partner. I’ll have to figure out some way to get it across to him that Dan and I aren’t an item.   

The situation receded from Kim’s thoughts as the hurricane descended on them. The thought of talking to her boss was replaced by the animal need of just surviving the approaching monster that would all but flatten their refuge.             



 

 

 

 

 

 

22

Five Years Before; The Beast Makes Landfall
Hurricane Buford hit St Thomas and the surrounding islands with a vengeance. While small and weak by comparison with hurricanes like Katrina, it still packed a tremendous one-two punch of wind and water.

     The resort’s large plate glass windows looking out on the pool and onward to Saint John’s Island had been left un-boarded. It was felt they were protected under the three-meter deep overhang of the patio roof. The roof was masonry and was actually the floor of the deck that came off of the master bedroom suite and ran the length of the house on floor up.     

     Four hours into Buford’s attack on the area brought a small funnel cloud to the eastern corner of the island.  The tornado had been spawned on the outskirts of Charlotte Amalie, the major town on St. Thomas where thousands of cruise ships’ passengers descended almost daily to shop in the large duty free area. 

It had weaved and jumped its way across the length of St. Thomas and had briefly touched the island of Large Saint James just a few hundred meters to the south between the CORDEX refuge and St. Thomas.  

Debris picked up as far away as Charlotte Amalie was hurled at the plate glass windows, shattering them all. Glass fragments blew inward into the living room and punctured the skin of many CORDEX employees. Two people got glass in their eyes. 

Panic set in as the people huddled in the living room tried to get away from the flying glass, debris, and rain pouring through the broken windows. Several ran to the front door and throwing it open, ran into the storm. One immediately turned back when the wind whipped rain pelted their face with hard, viscous stings. The other, a man named Manny Jenkins, a communications technician, continued to run toward the mobile communications van sitting on the highest point of the small island. The sea covered the lower third of the island and waves crashed onto the hillside close to the van.      

He slipped on the steps leading to the van’s door and fell hard, hitting his head on the edge of the topmost metal step. Dazed, with blood in eyes, he tried to stand only to fall again. He crawled to the door on his hands and knees, and still on his knees, he began several vain attempts to enter the correct combination to the van’s security lock.   

He finally keyed the correct combination of letters and numbers on the lock’s keypad and he heard the lock’s audible click even with the winds howling around him. 

He tore open the door against the heavy winds and crawled inside. The wind slammed the door behind him. He lay on the floor panting and shivering from his injury and the cold from the evaporation of the rainwater from his storm soaked clothes. 

As his breathing became easier and quieter, he became aware of the rain striking the metal shell of the van like thousands of tiny bullets. He lay with his back on the floor with his eyes shut, listening to the rat-a-tat-tat sound of the rain. Suddenly a gust of wind rocked the van. The van’s right side wheels left the ground as the wind teeter the van almost to the point of flipping over. The only thing that prevented this disaster was the anchor cable that had been attached to a long steel pin driven over a meter into the rocky island. The anchor cable extended to its full length and held the van safe from flipping over. As the wind gust passed, the van slammed back down to the ground. 

The impact of the van hitting the ground brought a grunt from Manny and his eyes flew open at the violent crash the van had made. He couldn’t see anything out of his left eye since it was filled the trickling blood from the head wound he had given himself on the steps.    

He had to get a message out to come save them. The crazy people in command in the house were going to get them all killed. This storm was deadly and Manny had never been in anything like before. He was terrified and yelped as another gust of wind raised the van off the ground once again.      

He shakily rose to his knees and duck walked over to the communications console. He keyed the radio microphone and yelled, “Mayday! Mayday!  Base, this is Little Saint James. Send help! We can’t survive this storm! We’ll all die. Come help us, please!”

He didn’t want those assholes in the house to attempt to contact Base and override his Mayday. He reached into a jungle of wires in a patch panel next the communications console and ripped out a handful of wires. This effectively cut off the various runs of co-axial cables to the house. Not only couldn’t they send any messages; they could not receive any, nor listen to the weather radio or the satellite television feeds. The house was now totally cutoff from the outside world. 

Manny managed a thin smile. Take that you miserable bastards. You’ve got no right to put us in this kind of danger!  

 He began repeating his Mayday message hoping Base would hear him and respond. 

In the house, Lt. James ran to the front door and slammed it shut and bolted it. He yelled for Kim Danby and Dan Hoch, who came running from their duty positions in each wing of the house.  

It was hard to hear anything over the roar of the wind and rain coming from the now empty window openings. A team had been quickly assembled and were busily attempting to nail boards across the openings.   

“We’ve got a problem.” Lt James started. He explained how Manny Jenkins had run from the house. He was just about to discuss what they should do when one of the communications technicians ran in and whispered in his ear. Lieutenant James’ eyebrows lifted as he listened to the technicians report. 

“Well team, we have another problem.” He said as the technician ran back to the communications room. “It appears that our boy Manny has hijacked the mobile van and has cut us off from any outside source of information. The communications folks know he sent at least on Mayday message before they lost the feeds.”

“We can assume he is still sending the SOS.” Lt. James ended. 

Kim Danby jumped in, “Eh, Lieutenant, sir, I suggest we go get him and place him under restraints. He must be terrified of this storm. I know I am.”       

Lt. James was surprised to hear his second in command being so open about her fears of the storm. He was impressed that she could be truthful even if it made her look weak or emotional (of which she was neither). For not the first time he took a good look at her and began to like what he saw more and more. Not only as a security officer, but also as a strong, challenging woman. It’s too bad about her relationship with Hoch. I might’ve tried to develop one with her myself! He mused.

The three quickly set about formulating a plan to secure the communications van and detain Jenkins. The plan was simple. The Lieutenant and Officer Hoch would storm the van with just their TASER weapons. Kim would take up a position outside the van in case, somehow, Jenkins managed to escape the men’s grasp and tried to run.  

While the security team had been talking, Manny Jenkins had been busy with his own defenses. He had found a coil of number-twelve electrical cable. The cable carried three wires, a black, a white and a copper. He sliced the insulation from one end of the roll and tied the white wire to the metal floor grating just inside the entrance.  This grating was intended to act like a doormat allowing anyone entering to wipe the mud from his or her shoes before stepping into the interior of the van. 

The attached the black wire to the metal handle of the inner door to the communications compartment. A person entering the van would be standing on the grating while grabbing the interior door handle. That person would complete the electric circuit that Manny was creating between the grating and the door.

Manny unrolled the cable to the back of the auxiliary radio unit. He searched the circuit board until he found the input leads from the unit’s power supply. He quickly spliced the ends of the cable to the two leads from the step up transformer. The circuit was now active and anyone on the grating who touched the door would receive the a little more than the equivalent of a farmer’s electric fence. Not enough to kill, but enough to stun. 

He felt protected now that he had the trap set and went back to sending his Mayday message. He was becoming more and more hysterical as the van shuddered and rocked from the buffeting of the winds.  

The Lieutenant and Hoch approached the van’s steps and quickly made their way up the steps. The noise of the storm masked their footfalls.  

The Lieutenant took the lead with Hoch following. Kim took up her position at the foot of the steps with her regulation firearm. 

Lt. James slammed through the outer door and took the single step to the inner door. He reached out, grabbed the handle and --- CRACK. All he saw was an orange and yellow ball of fire leaping from his hand to the door and felt the jolt as his muscles seized. His body was thrown backward by the electrical jolt. He crashed into Hoch who had just stepped through the outer door. Together, they fell in a heap out of the door and tumbled down the steps to the base of the van. Hoch had the breath knocked out of him and Lieutenant James was still out from the electrical charge he had taken. His TASER fell at Kim’s feet.

Manny Jenkins stuck his head out to see if the men were going to be of any more concern to him. Kim saw his head appearing from the edge of the door. She reacted without thinking and, with all of her strength, slammed the heavy metal door into Manny’s head. Not once, but three times in rapid succession. 

Manny slid to the bottom of the door as he tried to focus his eyes.  Kim grabbed the TASER, step onto the first step of the van and slammed the TASER against the side of his neck. She fired two charges into him to make sure he was down. 

She then tended to the Lieutenant while Hoch reconnected the patch panel and brought the house back into the communications loop. 

Together they aided Lt. James back to the house fighting the winds and rain from the unrelenting storm. By the time they arrived there, he had pretty much recovered from the effects of the electrical charge he had taken.

The medical team insisted that the Lieutenant should rest for the remainder of the evening. He was still a little shaky and Hoch assisted him to his cot. They had talked about how Kim had responded and what a great addition she made to the security team.

As Hoch turned to leave, the Lieutenant said, “Officer Hoch. That is one great woman you have there.” 

Hoch turned with a confused look on his face. “Woman? What woman?” 

“Why Officer Danby, of course.” Lt. James exclaimed. 

“Danby? And me? Where the hell did you get that idea? We’re just good friends!”

“Good friends? Excuse me, but I saw her kiss you after your Karate exercises and I thought that you two were -.”

  Hoch interrupted with a deep laugh. “Danby and me? God no. She just thanked me for getting her started in Karate as she loves it so much.” 

“Oh, I see. So you two aren’t together?”

“No way. We really aren’t each others’ type.” 

“Well that’s good to know. I mean you didn’t want me to have the wrong idea did you?” Lieutenant James hurriedly tried to continue as amusement played on Hoch’s face.

“Oh no sir! Certainly not! You’re getting the wrong idea. Our Officer Kim Danby is a free spirit with no attachments as far as I know.” Hoch said with a smile. 

“Good night, Lieutenant.” Hoch said as he left the room.

“Good night, Officer Hoch.” Lt James replied.                               

 

                                                                                                                                  

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

23

In Closet 21
Kim requested an immediate meeting with Bolino. Brad was seated at his desk dealing with mundane day-to-day business of running the station. Kim dropped heavily into the chair facing him across the desk.

She was edgy about how to begin with Brad. The desk between them felt like a fortress with Kim as an enemy at the gates.

The effect melted away when Brad sneezed into a tissue and wiped his watery eyes. He went from being an emperor in his fortress to just an administrator with a cold. Kim cleared her throat, became the professional law enforcement officer she knew she was, and began. “Director Bolino, we have come across evidence of a nature that implicates you in the second sabotage incident. I must advise you that anything you say can and will be used against you in court of law. “

Bolino looked stunned. He bolted upright in his chair, looked Kim in the eye, and demanded, “What evidence? What are you talking about?”

“We have evidence that your security card was used to access the workstation where the worm was introduced to the guidance system. We have computer forensics that indisputably proves this. I need to ask you some questions. Will you cooperate?”

“My God, woman, yes. Ask me anything. I’ve done nothing wrong.” Bolino sat back and awaited the first question, still with a tissue to his eyes.

“First thing is do you have your security card with you? Can I see it, please? And, please, only hold it by the edges. There may be prints we can lift,” Kim demanded.

Brad fumbled in his tunic jacket breast pocket and pulled out the card. Holding it by the edges with his thumb and forefinger, he stared at it a moment and laid it on the desk between himself and Kim. She carefully picked it up and placed it in a plastic sandwich bag to protect it.

She now looked at it through the plastic and asked, “Has this card been in your possession the whole time?”

Why, yes. At least I think so. The only time it’s not on my person is when I’m sleeping. I leave it on the coffee table in my cubicle when I’m at home.”

Each station executive staff member had a living space about the size and layout of a hotel suite. The living area was separated from the sleeping area by a wall and doorway.

“At the time of the guidance system worm incident, where were you?”

Brad thought for a moment. “Why, home sleeping. The Doctor had given me a cold medication that knocked me out for a few hours. The damned stuff hasn’t helped my cold much.”

Kim asked another dozen questions and told Brad that he would remain a suspect until she either proved his guilt or innocence.

As she got to the door, she turned and said, “Brad, I have one more question. I know this is very personal but I need to know. Have you had sexual relations with anyone on the station the last few months? I promise I will be discrete with the information.”

Brad looked somewhat embarrassed. “Yes. But I am not giving her name to you. There are some things that are...”

Kim cut him off. “Brad, you can either tell me and help me, or I will find out other ways. And you know I will find out. So what’s it going to be? Be the southern gentleman and protect the lady’s good name while hindering the investigation, or aid my investigation and come clean. Now!”

Brad appeared even more embarrassed. “Kim, you know my wife is due to arrive here next month. If she found out, my marriage would be over. I don’t want that. Please understand.”

“Brad, I don’t want to hurt any innocent party, and certainly not your wife. Your infidelity is between you two, but I need to know who would know your personal habits and know the card would be laying on the coffee table in easy reach of the door to your cubicle.”

Brad coughed and said, “There have been two women since I arrived here. The young Naval Ensign in the Control Center, Amanda Eads, is here every Tuesday night. And Francine Cruz, our station doctor, all but attacked me a few weeks ago and has been my bedmate several nights a week ever since then.”

Kim nodded and then she departed, leaving a very concerned Bolino.

When she returned to her temporary desk, an envelope was lying on top. It was addressed simply to Kim Danby and had been laser printed. Handling it by the corners, she opened it and removed the single sheet of paper on the inside.

The note was unsigned. It simply stated that the anonymous sender had information about the sabotage incidents that Kim would find ‘of great value’. She was instructed to come alone to Closet 21, the personnel safety shelter furthest from the inhabited area of the dumbbell. And be there within the hour.

She placed the envelope and sheet of paper in a plastic bag and sealed the bag. She then wrote a note explaining where she was going and placed it with the bag and locked it in her desk drawer. The note was addressed to Lt. James and outlined all of the new information she had from Bolino and the mysterious note. If anything happened to her, Lt. James would find the note and hopefully complete the investigation. She could have called him, but thought better of it. If she could get information that would lead to an arrest, her peers would be impressed, especially the lieutenant.

She went to the safe in the Security office and removed her .38/44 caliber police special. Checking the chamber, she reached into the safe and opened an ammunition box, removed six bullets and loaded the weapon. She put extra six rounds in her tunic pocket.

Regulations called for her to notify the Station Director when any security officer determined the need to carry one of their firearms. This was so the Director could notify emergency services to be ready for a ‘meteor intrusion’ drill. Using firearms in space usually led to holes being punched thorough the hull. The meteor intrusion drill was a test of the ability of an emergency team to seal hull breaches quickly. The team, knowing a drill was being planned, would keep the sealing equipment at hand.

She thought for a moment. It would not do to notify Bolino since he was still a suspect. She decided to inform Adam Sand and let him deal with it. She called Adam and informed him; using the excuse that Bolino was still ‘under the weather’ from his cold.

Locking the safe, she looked in her desk drawer and removed the bundle of nylon restraints and placed three in her pocket. Police favored this type of restraint over the traditional handcuffs due to availability of illegal handcuff keys on the street. Back in the early 2000’s, a prisoner arrested for assault, killed two Florida Highway Patrol officers in their car after he unlocked his handcuffs while being transported to the police station for interrogation. Following that incident, almost all restraint was done with the nylon straps.

She took a final look around the room and left for her rendezvous with the mysterious informant. She drove the security sled to the end of the dumbbell furthest from the elevators that brought people down from the reception area.

There were not yet any inhabitants in this end of the station. As new staff arrived and the station was opened up to their families, those families would be housed at this end of the station in dependent housing that was yet to be built. Currently, pallets of modular walls were being stored in an almost haphazard fashion around the area. 

Several pallets shielded the entrance to Closet 21 from view.

Kim dismounted the sled and walked cautiously toward the emergency shelter entrance. She pulled her weapon as she neared the opening. The exterior lights near the entrance were out. The entrance was cast in gloom. She gave herself a moment to allow her eyes to adjust to the gloom. “Okay.” She muttered to her self, “On three I go in. One … Two …” 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

24

Seeking Aid
Francine was worried. If they found out about her affair with Brad Bolino, and her relationship with Rafael, they might put two and two together. If they figured out she had taken Brad’s security card and let Rafael use it, she was toast. 

The affair had been all her idea. She liked Bradley a lot, and felt that both of them were very lonely and neither wanted a permanent or serious relationship. She had a solid relationship on the ground with a wonderful person who made her heart sing. He had a wife whose picture was always on Brad’s desk. But a little no-strings attached fun on the station would be okay. No one would know and no one would be hurt. 

She never expected her brother to ask her to exploit her involvement with Brad. When he ordered her to steal Brad’s card, she had complied. He had threatened to make Brad’s wife aware of what was going on. Better to give in to Rafael’s demands than take a chance of having everything exposed. 

Even if she said she had no idea what Rafael wanted with the card, the very act of taking it would make her guilty of being an accomplice in whatever Rafael was doing. 

She needed to call in some favors. And confess to her Earth-side lover. 

She scanned through her cell phone address book until she found the Earth-side number she wanted.  She selected the number and waited for it to connect. It rang twice at the other end and voice answered, “Hello?” 

“Hi, it’s me. Francine. I need your help. I’m in trouble.” Francine blurted out.  

The voice responded in a soothing tone, “Now, now, calm down my dear. What’s wrong? How can I help?”

Francine launched into a lengthy summary of what she had done for her half-brother. She explained what was happening on the station at the moment and what she thought would happen to her when the security team delved into the facts. Her voice quivered with nervous energy and some fear as she described her role in Rafael’s plans. 

The person at the other end of the phone listened quietly and didn’t interrupt Francine as she poured out her problems. 

Francine hesitated and seemed unsure how to continue.

The voice asked, “Is there more?”

“Yes. But you’re not going to like it. You’ll probably hate me. You should hate me.” Francine replied.

“I could never hate you. I love you.” The voice stated. 

“I --- I love you too. But you will never believe that after I tell you.” Francine sobbed into the phone.

“Tell me.” The voice ordered with some trepidation. 

“I --- I slept with Brad Bolino.” Francine cried. 

“You what? I thought we --- I mean, I thought you and I were…” The voice seemed to be struggling with Francine’s last admission. “How many times?

“Maybe eight or nine.” Francine admitted to the faraway voice. 

The growing silence from the other end of the line was more than Francine could stand. 

“It meant nothing! He was just a diversion. It’s so lonely up here. I feel so isolated with Rafael’s constant demands. I just wanted some companionship. I’m sorry!” Francine cried.  

“Okay Francine. We’ll talk about this whole affair thing when you get back to Earth. Is there anything else you need to tell me?” The voice said without a hint of emotion.  

Francine told of Rafael’s threats about Brad’s wife and his pushing her to steal Brad’s security card.  She continued until she brought the story completely up to date and then stopped.   

When Francine had finally rundown, the voice had responded. “How did you get yourself into such a position? I don’t know if I can do anything to get you out of this. Maybe I can do something. I don’t know. Let me work on it. Alright?”  

Francine replied, “Yes please! That’s why I called you. Maybe when the facts come out people will see I’m just a pawn in this too. Your so close to the President, maybe you can do something to persuade him to forgive me?”

“Alright Francine. I’ll do what I can.” The voice promised and hung up.

Francine was left with a dead phone line and a dying outlook on her chances for the future.     

   



 

 

 

 

 

 

25

Attacked
“And three!” Kim finished her countdown and taking a deep breath, she crossed the threshold into Closet 21. The emergency lights came on as the sensors detected her movement. For a brief instance, the bright emergency lamps blinded her. An arm clamped around her neck and pulled her backward. At the same instance, a hand placed a wet cloth over her mouth and nose.

Surprised, Kim took a breath and immediately her head seemed to explode and she spiraled down into unconsciousness. Her last clear thought was, I’m being drugged. Whatever it is has a pungent odor. She struggled for a few seconds and went limp. The assailant struggled pulling Kim’s body deeper into the room.

The figure reached down and patted Kim’s body, stopping when the bulge of the gun was detected. The figure took the gun and threw it on a table close by. Continuing the pat down, the restraints were found and the extra ammunition removed. The assailant used the restraints to tie Kim’s hands behind her back and tie her ankles together.

The attacker checked Kim’s reactions by raising an eyelid and shining a flashlight into the eye, and measuring her pulse. Taking the wet anesthetic drenched rag, the figure placed it over Kim’s mouth and nose and held it there while Kim took three or four shallow breaths. Her breathing perceptibly slowed.

Throwing the rag on the table, the figure picked up the pistol and ammunition, tossed them into a black leather bag. Then, using a screwdriver, disabled the automatic sensor that controlled the interior lights. The room was plunged in darkness. The assailant checked the exterior and then exited, and closed the entrance door. The figure stopped, cursed a mild oath, and turned back to the room. The shadowy figure walked back to the table and picked up the rag used to knock out Kim. The rage was stuffed into the black leather bag as the figure exited the safety closet.   

The assailant walked to Kim’s security sled, reached in, and touched the auto-return function on the keypad. The sled moved away heading back to the garage at the base of the elevators at the other end of dumbbell. Buckling on a PPU, the assailant lifted toward Core City at the station’s weightless center. 

The PPU only needed to fire for a second and the figure was moving upward toward the jungle of flying offices. Moving swiftly, the figure took off the PPU and hung it on a PPU rack at the first flying office encountered.

The assailant began moving along the center of the flying offices and soon merged with the normal public traffic and disappeared into the human hubbub.

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

26

The Saboteur Strikes Again
The crystal-growing experimental laboratory was in the zero gravity point of Core City.

Crystals are grown by separating all the building block molecules into individual units in water and letting them fall naturally into their appropriate place in the repetitive structure as the water evaporates. By applying a low voltage direct electrical current to the water solution, the shape of the repetitive structure can be influenced and controlled.

Zero gravity allowed the experimenters to create precise molecular structures without the inherent problems caused by effects of gravity on the different structures being built in the electrical field.

Current experiments were creating a crystal knife blade one-molecule thick on its cutting edge. This was a sharper cutting edge than any current medical scalpel manufacturers could boast. And it could be made much cheaper than any of the currently produced medical scalpels.

Half of the lab had been turned into a rudimentary manufacturing plant to validate the feasibility of mass-producing the super sharp knife blades. Several thousand blades of different size and shape were now packed in special boxes awaiting shipment Earth-side for live testing on the blades’ life and uses.

The blades were so sharp that special packing boxes had to be designed that held the crystal by the spine, the thickest part of the blade. If the sharp edge of the blade came in contact with any substance weaker than a diamond, the knife was guaranteed to cut through the substance like butter.

As Kim was rushing to Closet 21, two small shaped charges placed hours before at each end of the crystal lab detonated severing the lab’s tether lines. A third small charge taped to the underside of the lab detonated in a planned action to overcome the lab’s inertia, and the lab began slowly moving away from the center of the core.

The lab began a gentle float toward the station’s floor a half-kilometer below. It took forty minutes for the lab structure to impact with the floor. When it did, the lab’s forward momentum caused its complete destruction.

Impacting the rotating floor, the lab turned over and over and began to disintegrate as it hit more substantial structures attached to the floor. The thousands of knife blades released from their packing cases caused part of the disintegration. They cut through the lab walls and floor with ease as they randomly flew around the tumbling structure. It rolled almost half a kilometer before coming to rest.

Lab contents and razor-sharp, broken crystal was strewn from the point of impact to the point of rest almost half the way around the interior of Storm Killer. Parts of the knives had sliced through the inner wall and were imbedded in the inner wall of the station. Two crewmen had bee unlucky enough to be where shards of the knives landed. One man lost his right foot as the shard sliced through his ankle. The other died within minutes from multiple internal injuries from several shards that had passed through his body.   Murder was now to be added to the list of charges against the perpetrator. 



 

 

 

 

 

 

27

Rescue
Lt. James was waiting by Kim’s desk when Hoch strode into the room.

“Have you seen Kim?” asked Lt. James.

“Why, no. I sent her a voice message about my latest findings. She hasn’t answered yet.”

“This worries me. It is not like her to ignore her voice messages. I left her one, too. If she is not here in another ten minutes, we start a search,” Lt. James said. He was worried. He never admitted it until now but he really liked the gutsy, smart woman. She was his equal in every way. After all of this was over, he would tell her how he felt. No use throwing a monkey wrench into the works and screw up the investigation with emotions at this point, he thought.

Lt. James cleared his mind and asked Hoch, “So, what have we learned so far? We might as well share our latest facts and set a plan of attack that we can pass by Kim.”

Hoch nodded and said, ”I found a white powder on the arm of the chair at the workstation that the perp used to get the worm into the system. Also found it on the memory stick reader. Didn’t you find some powder at the first crime scene?“

Lt. James nodded. “The powder I had the lab check out turned out to be a modified corn starch. And it was everywhere that one would assume a person might touch. I checked the station stores catalog and found only two cornstarch items onboard. One is a standard cornstarch used by our kitchen. The other item is medical examination and surgical gloves. Did you know many doctors favor the medical examination gloves containing cornstarch as opposed to a powdered glove? Interesting, don’t you think? Maybe we need to check with Dr. Cruz on her supply of gloves.”

Lt. James had been startled at Hoch’s first mention of the powder. That he had found a similar powder on the reversed input wires from the first incident was a matter of record. Powder from medical examination gloves at both scenes and the good Dr. Cruz was at the first scene. This house of cards may be falling! he thought. Just one or two more pieces of evidence and they might narrow the list to one suspect.

A problem with getting to one suspect was what he had learned about the reported broken camera. The camera had stopped functioning four days earlier and had been written up as ‘NRTS’ by the technician. NRTS meant Not Repairable This Station. Lt. James had personally tested the camera and found it functioning perfectly. The technician who had NRTS’ed the unit was none other than Rafael Denuza, the technician that Dr. Cruz had treated at the site of first incident.

“I’ll package a sample of the powder I found and send it down on the next shuttle. The lab should be able to verify it is the same stuff you found. Although, I have no doubt it is the same,” Hoch said.

Lt. James nodded and quickly filled Hoch in on his latest information. They discussed the case for a few minutes when Lt. James looked at his watch and stated, “OK. Kim is now officially missing in action. Let’s find her!”

Hoch, who had been sitting on the edge of Kim’s desk, started rummaging through the papers on top of the desk. Finding nothing there, he tried to open the desk drawer only to find it locked. He snapped to attention at this. It was standard protocol for the security agents to leave the desk unlocked and always place materials needing protection in the safe in their office. Same with their weapons; they were always kept in the safe.

“Lt. James, her desk drawer is locked,” Hoch reported pointing to the desk.

As senior security agent at the station, Lt. James had master keys for all desk drawers on the station. He went to the safe and got the key ring. He located the key that corresponded to the lock number and unlocked the drawer. 

He immediately saw the evidence bag and the note addressed to him. Grabbing the note, he read, “I’ve received an anonymous message telling me to come to emergency closet 21 for important information about the case. I’m going armed and ready. Here are some interesting facts I got out of Brad Bolino that points a strong suspicion at Dr. Cruz somehow being involved.”

The note went on to describe Bolino’s confessions.

While Lt. James had been reading the message, Hoch called up the real time vehicle map and found Kim’s cart back at the reception garage.

With quick agreement, Hoch headed off to check out Kim’s vehicle while Lt. James pocketed his Glock and headed for Closet 21.

Before he left, he had opened Kim’s desk drawer and picked up the small black leather bag he had seen when he was searching earlier. He unzipped it, surveyed the contents, closed it, and stuck it in his pants pocket. Kim and I have something to talk about later, he thought as he exited the room.

Lt. James decided to ignore firearm notification since he was now uncertain as to Bolino’s involvement. He was fairly certain that Kim would have notified someone of her intention to carry her weapon. He would just accept the consequences of carrying his gun without proper notification.

Lt. James arrived at Closet 21 in less than ten minutes. The door was shut. He pulled his weapon and shouted Kim’s name. Nothing. Silence. Positioning himself at the right side of the door, he quickly opened the door and yelled, “Security, Freeze!” The closet was dark - nothing could be seen of the interior.

He reached around the door edge and touched the interior light panel. Nothing happened. Lt. James requested the mainframe’s to turn on the interior lights. Nothing happened. He called for Kim and got no reply.

Lt. James pulled his small flashlight and assuming the classic police stance with the flashlight and gun, he took a deep breath and entered the closet.

Kim was slowly returning to consciousness as twirling stars and rockets exploded in her head. She felt deathly ill from whatever anesthetic had been administered to her. She tried to sit up and found her arms immobile and her hands bound behind her back. Unable to sit up, she rolled over on her side and threw up. She lost consciousness for a moment and when she awoke again, she found her face resting in her own vomit. She threw up again and successfully rolled over.

She couldn’t see anything. It was totally dark wherever she was. She was still slipping in and out of awareness. She dropped her head back to the floor and slipped into a deep, drugged sleep.

The next thing she remembered was Lt. James leaning over her with a very concerned expression. He was gently holding her head and wiping the vomit from her face. He saw her eyes flicker open and recognition register. He lifted her up and hugged her tightly to his chest.

Laying her back down, he touched her face, smiled and said, “Danby, I told you that you were in over your head. How do you feel? Can you move?” as he cut the restraints binding her hands and legs. She stretched her extremities to work the kinks from her stiff muscles. She simply nodded to him that all appeared to be working OK.

Lt. James looked around the room, “Kim, did he get your gun?” Kim nodded.

Lt. James touched his cell intercom button, “Hoch? I’ve got her. Beware! The perp took her gun. So we have to consider the saboteur is now armed and dangerous.” Both Hoch and Kim groaned at the mention of her lost weapon.

Lt. James went on, “I’m taking Danby back to our quarters. We cannot assume she’s safe in her rooms and we can’t take her to the Doctor for a checkup. Until we figure out Dr. Cruz’s tie-in to this whole thing, we cannot trust the good doctor. And don’t discuss this with anyone in the executive ranks. Especially Bolino. If we really need executive aid, we’ll go to Sand.”

Lt. James sat back and watched as Kim slowly got to her feet and stumbled very unsteady out the doorway. She made it to his vehicle and dropped heavily into the passenger seat. She breathed deeply for several minutes. Each breath seemed to clear her head more and her stomach had stopped doing flips.

He walked up to the cart. “Why the hell didn’t you wait for Hoch or me before you went running off to this Godforsaken spot? Are you that hungry to claim all the glory for yourself on this case?”

Kim shook her head. “Well, if I’d had an idea of getting all the glory for myself, my current situation of having been stupid enough to go it alone, being overpowered, and having my weapon taken would certainly change that. Don’t you think?”

He got in and began the drive back to his quarters without saying a word.

At that moment, all hell broke loose as the crystal lab crashed three hundred meters away.



 

 

 

 

 

 

28

Crashed Crystals
Kim and Lt. James were the first to the crash site. The lab was scattered over a long, narrow area of the station’s floor. Nothing remained of the actual structure. It had fallen apart as it rolled, being sliced apart by the knife blades, and struck the many stationary objects along its path.

Broken crystals lay everywhere and twinkled when the observer caught them in the light at just the right angles.

Kim picked up a broken shard about fifteen centimeters long and placed it in a plastic evidence bag. She really had no idea what the crystal was for, but being the law enforcement professional she was, she took a piece as possible evidence.

Kim keyed her cell and called Adam Sands. “Adam? Get your ass over to quadrant B near closet 21. One of the flying workspaces from Core City just crashed to the station floor. There is crap everywhere. There may be casualties. And send someone up to Core City and see why the tethers broke, would you?”

Kim placed the evidence bag in the cart, and then she and Lt. James began slowly walking along the side of the debris field scanning for anything that might be a clue. 

It was Lt. James that found the dying crewman. Blood was still spurting from sliced arteries and his entire torso looked like a bloody sieve. Lt. James swore he could see daylight coming through the man’s abdomen. He examined the man and decided there was nothing he could do for him. Be the time the examination was over, the man had expired.

Kim had located the other crewman with the severed foot and had torn off a piece of the man’s pants and made a tourniquet out of it. She managed to staunch the bleeding and tried to make the man as comfortable as possible. She called for Francine and her nursing assistant to come and provide emergency services.

After ensuring the man was okay, she returned to find Lt. James bent over the now dead victim. Knowing there was nothing more to be done for the injured, they began to search for evidence again. 

They hadn’t been searching for more than a few minutes when Brad Bolino, Adam Sand, Greg Ballard, Reginald O’Donnell, and about half a dozen other department heads arrived at the scene. 

The group walked into the debris field looking at the destruction about a hundred meters from where Kim and Lt. James stood.

Suddenly, Reginald O’Donnell became very agitated. Kim saw him waving wildly and heatedly saying something to the group with him. He pointed down and all of the group’s eyes followed his pointed finger. The group began to lift their feet inspecting their shoes. They, then, began very gingerly to move back out of the debris field. The group made it to the edge and they all looked at the soles of their shoes again.

O’Donnell yelled to Kim and Lt. James, “Come away from the wreckage! You can be badly cut by the crystal blades you see strewn about! I didn’t realize this was the crystal lab. These crystals can tear apart your shoe soles, and cut right through your foot. You wouldn’t even feel it happening.”

Bolino, Sands, Lt. James, and Kim discussed the situation for several minutes and in the end were all nodding their heads.

It was agreed that O’Donnell would take control of the scene and have his science team from the crystal lab deal with the crystals. Adam assigned Greg to coordinate the site cleanup after O’Donnell gave the all clear. Hoch would be dispatched to look for evidence once the all clear was given.

Kim staggered and grabbed Lt. James’ arm. She moaned and shook her head in an attempt to clear the cobwebs that had just invaded her head again. She was still feeling the effects of her encounter in Closet 21.

Lt. James motioned to Kim to get into his cart.

“Come on, let’s get going. We both need a few minutes of down time. We’ll go to my quarters as planned and make a sandwich and some coffee. You need to rest for a few minutes,” Lt. James said to her.

He pushed the engine button on keypad button, and, turning the cart, headed for his quarters at a low speed to try to keep Kim comfortable.  




 

 

 

 

 

29

Orders
Rafael was dead tired. He had not slept since the string of attacks had started on Storm Killer. He had followed his orders and now had run to his place of refuge in one of the emergency closets. He had prepared a small hiding space for just this point in time. This space was hidden behind a false wall he had erected at the furthest point from the closet’s door. While it would not stand up to close scrutiny, anyone looking into the enclosure from the doorway would not detect the false wall.

He had stretched out to take a short nap and had already been sleeping for over two hours. The cell phone in his vest jacket began to ring and startled the sleeping man awake.

Rafael fumbled for the phone. He was instantly awake. The only one who knew about this phone was the person giving him his orders.

He clicked the green button on the phone. “Rafael,” he spoke.

He listened to the caller carefully. “Yes, yes, I got that. Where are the explosives stored? Really? How did you manage to get those aboard the station? Sorry. Yes, I understand, don’t ask you such questions. Really? This is my next to last task for you?”

“What do I do with the item you want me to remove from the control console?”

He listened to the voice and frowned. “You want me to destroy it? How will they ever regain station control without it?”

He listened again and felt more at ease. The voice assured him that there was a spare in station stores that would only take the station staff a few minutes to locate. 

The voice said a few extra minutes of chaos would ensure the station would never be allowed to go live again.

“Afterward, I go to the chapel message drop? Okay, I will.”

He repeated the instructions he’d just received and the caller hung up. Rafael buttoned the phone off and rose from the bed. My next to last task! He thought. Once these two remaining tasks were done, he could seek sanctuary with his friends above.

He left his hiding place and headed to where the voice on the phone had told him to go. As he was told, the cache of materials for his last assignment was there. A small canister, a small hose, a spool of wire, and two small metal boxes, each weighing less than two pounds, were all the materials he would need for this assignment. The only tools he took were a hand laser-cutting torch and a pair of wire cutters.

He loaded the items into a backpack and, hoisting the backpack, set off at a fast pace toward the target.

Just before arriving at the target area, he swung into the environmental control area and used his badge to access the panel containing the various air handling system controls. Finding the one he wanted, he turned the valve off. This effectively shutdown any air recycling in his target area.

He was not worried about surveillance cameras. His caller had assured him that the caller had taken care of the pesky cameras.

Arriving at the most hidden bulkhead to the room he was interested in, he set down the backpack and extracted the hand cutter. It took only a few seconds to cut a small hole into the target area. He pulled the canister from the backpack and attached the hose to it. Sliding the hose through the hole he’d just made, he turned the valve on the canister. The contents of the canister hissed out into the target area.

He looked at his watch and started counting off four minutes. That was the amount of time his sister had told him it would take for someone to succumb to the content of the container. Then he waited.

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

30

Escalation
Hoch was waiting for them when they arrived at Lt. James’ quarters. He had stopped at Kim’s and brought her a clean uniform. They filled Hoch in on the crystal lab crash site and the now open case of murder associated with it. 

With no other evidence other than the snapped tethers and the small bomb fragments, there was nothing else to glean from the site.

Kim sighed and said, “Guys, I have to shower. Between my puke, and the debris and dust at the lab crash site, I’m a mess. So excuse me, while I clean up.”

As she showered, the men discussed what the next step should be. Hoch was all for requesting a search of Dr. Cruz’s quarters for the missing weapon and her store of examination gloves. While Lt. James agreed, he wanted the results of deeper background checks on Denuza, Cruz, and Bolino before tipping their hand to the three suspects. The results were due back from the FBI and INTERPOL within next twelve hours.

Kim joined them as she towel dried her hair. She had put on the fresh uniform after the shower and felt remarkably good considering her recent captivity. She looked at the two men and stated, “I think we should go arrest all three until we get a handle on this whole thing. What’s to stop one or more of them from attempting another attack on Storm Killer? Right now, with the station in full ‘kill’ mode, any saboteur attack could prove devastating to all of us, or even the Earth. Remember, too, one of them has my weapon and may decide to use it.”

Lt. James looked to Hoch who nodded his head. Lt. James replied with a nod and turned to Kim. “OK. You’re right. We can’t let whichever one has the gun to keep it. The station and the personnel are way too vulnerable to be left at the gang of three’s tender mercies.”

Kim nodded agreement and said, “Let’s go round them up.”

Lt. James had retrieved Kim’s backup weapon while she showered and now passed it to her with a slight grin playing at the edges of his mouth. “Try hanging on to this one.” She looked at him sharply; she was about to issue a sharp retort when she saw the humor playing over his facial features.

She responded by laughing out loud and lightly punching him in the arm. “I’ll try.”

“We should interrogate Dr. Cruz first and get some answers about her examination gloves and her anesthetic supply,” Lt. James said through tightly drawn lips.

Lt. James looked at Hoch and requested, “Can you give us a minute? I need to talk to Danby about something personal.” Hoch eyed the two but decided not to say anything; he nodded and walked out without a word.

Kim looked at the lieutenant and asked, “What is it? Is something wrong? Do you want to rip me a new one for screwing things up so badly?” 

He shook his head, “No, Kim. I want to ask you how long you’ve been using.”

Kim lifted her head with a start and angrily replied, “Using? Who the hell says I’m using?”

She locked eyes with him and was determined to out last his stare. But as the seconds dragged on and his dark, penetrating gaze seemed to drill through her lie of denial, she dropped her eyes.

“How did you find out?” she asked quietly.

Lt. James explained how he had opened her desk trying to find out where she had gone and had noticed the obvious drug paraphernalia bag. He had seen enough of them in his career to immediately recognize one.

He reached in his pocket and took out the small bag and tossed it to her. “How long?”

She caved in and replied, “Since my hospitalization for my riot injuries. A long time ago now.”

He didn’t say anything so she continued; “I only use it to control some of my pain on really bad days.”

“Is today a bad day?” he asked.

She held her head up and looked right at him, “Yes, it is. I shot up just a while ago. It took the edge off the pain and gave me a real jolt of energy.”

He pondered her statement for a few moments. “Look, Kim, I care about you as a comrade and as a person. Hell, I care about you as a woman. But for Christ’s sake, you have to stop this stuff. You know that as well as I do.”

He stopped for a moment, drew a breath and continued, “I’m not going to say anything, or do anything unless I think this junk is effecting your ability to get the job done. If I see that happening, I won’t hesitate to report this and take over the investigation. We can’t have the investigation slowed down by a druggie who can’t think straight. Do I make myself clear?”

She could only nod in understanding.

“And when this is over, you and I are going to go somewhere, and I am going to stay with you until you get this crap out of your system once and for all. Do you understand me?”

“That could be a long time.” she replied quietly.

“Yes, it could be forever. Maybe it should be forever.”

With that he reached out and touched her cheek as he had when he had found her and untied her in Closet 21. She was happily taken back that he spoke of being with her ‘forever’.

She touched his hand and then he dropped it to his side and gruffly said. “Come on, we have criminals to catch.”

They met Hoch outside of the door and the three security members headed to the Doctor’s small infirmary and found her seated at her desk writing notes on a patient’s medical record. She didn’t seem surprised to see them and waved them to chairs situated across the desk from her asking, “What can I do for you?”

“Dr. Cruz, we have many questions to pose to you and would like for you to voluntarily accompany us to the temporary detention area. We are considering you a ‘person of interest’ at this time.”

Dr. Cruz seemed to have been expecting this action and calmly asked, “Might you inform me as to the reason you call me a ‘person of interest’?”

“Not at this time, Doctor. We’ll discuss that with you during your interrogation. You will now go with Hoch and be detained until we’re ready to question you,” Lt. James ordered firmly.

“But before you go, Dr. Cruz, you will please open your inventory files and give us the key to your medical supplies storage,” Kim added.

“One question for you, Doctor, before you leave,” Kim stated. “Which of your anesthetics has a pungent smell and can put a person out extremely quickly?”

Francine thought for a second and replied, “Halothane. It works extremely fast and has a very pungent odor. Why? Oh, my God, did someone try something with...”

“Never mind that now, we’ll discuss this with you later. Hoch, take her away.” Kim responded sharply cutting her off.

The Doctor looked none too happy as she did as instructed and left with Hoch for the temporary detention.

Lt. James and Kim determined from inventory that there were three canisters of Halothane aboard the station. The inventory also showed that the Doctor used two types of gloves, a powdered examination glove and a non-powdered surgical glove.

They took several of the examination gloves for comparison to the found traces of powder. They found one sealed canister of Halothane in storage and another unsealed canister in the Doctor’s surgical room. The doctor’s records indicated an appendectomy surgery had been performed that required the use of the Halothane. The quantity remaining in the canister had confirmed that only the amount indicated in the operating room records had been used. There was no sign of the third canister.

By this time, Hoch had returned from locking up Dr. Cruz. 

The three headed for the control center where they found Brad standing outside the main door. He was in an animated discussion with Adam. Both men abruptly stopped talking when they saw the three security officers approaching. 

Bolino looked at them and said, “What are you doing here? I don’t have time right now for answering any more questions. We have another crisis developing.”

Lt. James took the lead, placing a hand on Bolino’s arm and twisted it behind Bolino’s back in the classic police move. “Bradley Bolino, you are being detained for further questioning regarding the multiple attacks on this station.” He cinched the nylon restraints on Bolino’s wrists.

Bolino gasped, “What the hell? I’ve told you everything I know! Don’t you realize that we are under attack right now?”

The three security officers exchanged glances. “What attack?” Kim asked.

“Two minutes ago we lost contact with the control room. The doors will not open. The shift team will not respond to our calls. The security cameras in and around the control room are turned off. We have no idea what’s going on in there,” Adam responded, “and I’m very concerned. If Storm Killer is not rigidly monitored during the actual storm eye wall heating, anything might happen.”

At that moment, as if to add an exclamation point to Sand’s concerns, the station’s interior lighting dimmed, went out, and then flickered back to a low glow of emergency lighting.

At the same moment the lights dimmed, outside the station, two of the webs of magnifying film changed angles by less than one degree. This caused a narrowing of the intense cone of heat concentrating the beam directly into the very center of the storm’s eye. 

Instead of destroying the huge hurricane, the mechanism was now set to provide additional fuel to strengthen it by heating the ocean water.

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

31

Boil
On the surface of the ocean directly under the now deadly cone of light, two joint NOAA and NASA weather monitoring vessels in the eye of the storm became metal coffins for their crews. The air temperatures around the ships rose to one hundred and fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit in less than thirty seconds. Within ninety seconds, the air temperature rose to two hundred and eighty-five degrees. Within another minute, the temperature was over one thousand degrees, and continued to increase exponentially over time.

The heavy rain that had been falling changed to steam in an instant. The very surface of the water surrounding the ships began to boil.

The dozen crewmembers caught outside died quickly. The twenty-four men and women inside the vessels writhed in agony, attempting to draw breaths as their throats and lungs were slowly scorched over a twenty-minute period. Their lungs blistered and the blisters burst.

The water content of their bodies began to boil away and the skin literally burst into flame for the unfortunate crewmembers caught on deck. As the most intense part of the Storm Killer heat cone passed the ships, the stench of burnt flesh was left behind.

One of the boats’ captains managed to get off a radio report to the Abraham Lincoln before her throat blistered, swelled, and shut off her air.

On Storm Killer, the three security officers were not yet aware that the sabotage attempts had now escalated to mass homicide.

Nor did they know that the saboteurs’ plan had now switched from increasing the strength of Hurricane Edna to actually using Storm Killer’s heat ray as a cone of destruction across the face of the Earth.

The cone of intense light and heat began drifting toward the west heating the ocean waters in front of Edna’s project path. The next ship in line, three degrees away from this scene of death, was the Abraham Lincoln.

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

32

And Then There Was one
Lt. James looked at Hoch and pointed to Bolino. “Take him to the detention area and then get back here. While you’re doing that, we’ll try to figure out who’s running the show in there,” Lt. James nodded toward the closed control center door.

Hoch grabbed the frightened Bolino and none too gently led him away.

Kim said to Sand, “Let’s take a look at the last fifteen minutes of the recorded video on the control center door camera before it went out. Maybe we will see something or someone who…”

Lt. James had been scanning a computer log. He turned his head and interrupted Kim. “Never mind. The log indicates the cameras were turned off from the technician’s console in the maintenance section. I’m going to pull up the video from that camera.”

With that, he punched a series of keys on the nearest keyboard and the monitor lit with a picture of the maintenance section. He entered the commands to reverse the video to two minutes prior to the time the log had indicated the control center cameras had been turned off. On the monitor appeared a picture of maintenance engineer’s back as he was walking toward the surveillance system control board.

The engineer’s hands ran across the control board and various points on the board’s monitor screen went from green to red indicating that the cameras were no longer active. He then appeared to be keying something on the control board keyboard. The engineer turned and they recognized the face of Rafael Denuza. He looked at his watch. A look of alarm came over his features, and he strode quickly out of the picture as he headed out of the doorway.

“For someone that has been so clever so far, he certainly screwed up this time. Letting himself be recorded performing his sabotage,” Sand said.

“I don’t think he forgot. I think he was in such a hurry he had to take the risk that he would not be identified. He seemed to be almost in a panic and racing against time,” Kim responded.

“Based on this video showing him keying something on the keyboard, I would be willing to bet that Denuza changed the passwords for the camera controls. So chances are we’re not going to get the cameras back on line any time soon,” Lt. James opinioned.

She sighed. “We have to assume that it is Denuza in the control room. And we have to assume he is armed with my weapon. So how do we get him out of there?”

As they considered their options, Hoch delivered his charge to the temporary lockup. Bolino looked completely dejected and miserable as Hoch locked him in. Hoch checked his watch and decided to stop by the security office to see if any of the requested background checks results had arrived.

He entered the office and found the ‘your eyes only mail waiting’ icon flashing on the computer screen. Hoch tapped the icon and quickly scanned the incoming mail. He immediately saw the high priority ‘eyes only’ mail item. Tapping this item, he read and then reread the memo in disbelief. The Storm Killer station was now responsible for the deaths of thirty-six people. He printed a copy of the memo and stuffed it in his tunic packet.

As he waited for the printout, he found the background check results in the waiting mail list. Opening the item, he was further astonished by what he read. He tapped his waistband cell on and called Lt. James.

“Lieutenant, I’ve gotten the background checks of our three suspects. Are you ready for this? When Dr. Cruz was divorced several years ago, she kept her married name. Our good Dr. Cruz’s maiden name was Denuza. She and Rafael Denuza have the same father. They are half-brother and sister. Both were born in Mexico and have lived in southern California and northern Mexico on and off most of their lives.”

Lt. James passed on the information to Kim and then asked Hoch, “Anything else in the report we should know?”

“Only that Denuza has apparently been becoming more and more of a radical environmental protectionist the last few years.”

“Anything else? How about Bolino? Is he tied into those two?”

“No. He appears clean, but there is a serious incident groundside that has just happened that you need to know about, but I can’t tell you over this open voice circuit. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

Hoch trotted toward the control center trying to avoid stubbing a toe and falling. It was tough to see well. With just the emergency lights shining, it was more like a moonlit evening than the normal daylight illumination. The station’s worker bees were out attending to their daily duties. Many carried emergency lights. Hoch wished he had time to go his quarters and get his emergency light. But time was short and they needed to wrest the station’s control center out of the hands of Denuza.

When he arrived at the control center building, he found Lt. James had dispatched technicians to put the cameras back in operation and two other techs were installing loudspeakers at the locked door to the control room.

Hoch stated, “Let me tell you - these people are now mass murder suspects as well as being single homicide and saboteur suspects.” With that, he filled them in on the reported deaths from Storm Killer’s errant targeting. “The stakes have been raised!” he concluded.

Adam interjected, “You don’t know how much the stakes have changed. If we don’t regain control of the station and refocus the lens very soon, there is every possibility that we could actually cause Edna to grow into a Category Five monster.”

Kim asked Sand, “Exactly how long is ‘very soon’?”

“Within the next three to four hours, at the rate Storm Killer is raising the ocean temperature in the hurricane’s track.”

Kim looked from Hoch to Lt. James and ordered, “Hoch, you stay here and make sure Denuza doesn’t try to get away. When the techs are finished with the speakers, you and Adam get on the horn and try to convince Denuza to return control and come out, before he does even more damage. Lt. James, come with me.”

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

33

Francine’s Friend 
Lawton Wilder, the current President of the United States, was an old campaigner from Illinois. His graying temples proudly proclaimed his years of campaigning. He was into his third year in office. His trim fifty-year-old body moved gracefully through the hidden door that connected the Oval Office with his private secretary. He was a vegetarian, a distance runner, and a middle of the road politician. 

He had just finished an oatmeal breakfast with Lara Steele, his secretary. She had discussed some very serious matters about troubles on Storm Killer. Wilder had never liked that project from the get go.  It was too science fiction for his tastes. 

Now, his own secretary informs him of a plot to possibly disable the station just as it was to become operational. She had gotten the information from a person on board the station that was involved in the plot but more as a mole than a participant. The President rapped his fingers on the desk and thought angrily. Where the hell are my security agencies? My own secretary knows more about what is going on up there than all of these high-powered security agencies.     

Lara had asked for his protection for her source. He had conditionally granted it based on what the source would feed to Washington about the apparently on-going plot against the station.  

The President sat back in his chair as Alan Hardy, the Chief of Staff, walked in with two of their most senior advisors flanking his sides. The President raised his eyebrows. It was rare to see these three people together.  

“Sir. I must talk to you about a grave matter concerning Storm Killer.” The senior advisory on Hardy’s left side requested of the President. He was Harold Henry, a good-looking thirty-eight year-old, acting as the Home Land Security senior advisor.   

“What’s the problem?” 

“Sir, it has come to my attention that at least one saboteur is on Storm Killer. This person is attempting to disable Storm Killer. There may be more than one on board.” 

“How did you come by this information?” asked the President.

“From a friend on the station who seems to know what is going on up there. There appears to have been at least one act of sabotage to this point and the onboard security team is investigating as we speak.”

“What is it you want of me? The Security team will have to uncover the facts and let my office know. At that point I will make whatever decisions must be made.”  

“Sir, Please. I would like to ensure that my source on board is shielded from any prosecution. The source will continue to provide inside information, if we can ensure both protection and relief from prosecution. I would suggest we do it since this will give us current and accurate inside information.”    

  The President considered what he had just heard. He now had two independent sources saying pretty much the same thing. There were problems on the station and the sources needed some form of protection. 

“Okay, as long as your source is not an active participant in the sabotage, I’ll consider granting amnesty in exchange for his or her information.”   

He waved the visitors out, but asked Alan Hardy to stay for a moment. When the door closed, President Wilder said, “Alan, this information collaborates another independent source saying pretty much the same thing about what is happening on Storm Killer. I need you to coordinate the information coming in from Harold Henry and from my own secretary, Lara.”

Alan appeared startled to hear this and immediately nodded his head in the affirmative. “Yes sir, I’ll go talk to Lara right now and have her pass any information to me. The same with Mr. Henry.”   

The President nodded and looked down the first paper on top of the stack on his desk. Within seconds, President Wilder forgot Storm Killer’s plight, as other problems needed addressing.   



 

 

 

 

 

 

34

The Flag Ship
Rear Admiral Olsen had just been apprised of the demise of the crews of the two vessels to the west of the Abraham Lincoln’s current position. Based on the observed speed of the light cone’s drift, his ship was threatened with extinction in a little less than one and a half hours.

He gathered his senior staff and the lead civilian scientific observers on the bridge. They were all murmuring in low tones among themselves. They had all been on duty when Storm Killer took its first victims. They knew the deadly light cone was headed their way. They knew what the power of the murderous cone could do to their own vessel.

As Olsen walked onto the bridge, the murmuring turned to silence.

“As you all are aware, the vessels, Gordon Gunter and Albatross IV, were directly hit by Storm Killer’s light beam a little over five minutes ago. No one lived through the tremendous heat spike when the cone passed over the vessels. The Storm Killer staff is currently not able to control the station because of multiple acts of sabotage,” Olsen briefed the staff.

“The heat cone is now drifting our way. It will be here in less than seventy-five minutes unless the Storm Killer staff can regain control. We have two motor launches, with a dozen crewmembers, still attempting to return to the Lincoln. They had been placing sensor buoys for storm data gathering, until I issued a recall. I did that as soon as I received word of the Gordon Gunter and Albatross disaster. We can move the ship about fifteen miles south of our current position and all but ensure our safety but it’ll be at the cost of those dozen crewmen. If we take that option, we need to move now. So I put it to you, what are your thoughts.”

Olsen was proud of his regular navy staff. To a man, his officers said they should stay at their post and recover the sailors. The civilian staff agreed.

Olsen nodded and said, “That’s my feeling, too. We’ll stay here and recover the away crews. And pray that Storm Killer’s staff regains control in time.”

The captain offered the staff a possible way to save themselves, if needed. “We may survive the cone, if we set up safe rooms deep in the bowls of the ship using the refrigerated meat and vegetable lockers. That would put at least fifteen decks of steel between the flight deck and us. I’ve ordered the kitchen crew to move all of the ice on board into those lockers. We’ll make safe rooms in them. We can go hungry for a day or two. The entire complement of crew and civilians can barely fit into those two refrigerated spaces. If all else fails, we’ll all take refuge in these spaces and pray we can survive the temperature spikes we expect to be subjected to.”

The assembled group nodded and voiced agreement. Olsen dismissed the group with a curt, “That is all, return to your duties.”

Olsen turned to the bridge window and stared to the west through the heavy rain where a definite yellow glow could be seen over the horizon. God help us, he silently prayed.

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

35

Contentions, Confessions, and Concessions
Mexico City – 7:10 AM
The President of Mexico was on the secured telephone with his counterparts in Belize, Costa Rico and Guatemala. “Gentlemen, we have a serious situation developing. Senator Gutierrez has just briefed me. He is here with me now if you have any questions.”

He explained the current status of Storm Killer and the deaths of the people in the storm’s eye. “It is as we thought,” he continued, “the experiment is running wild and will probably cause the storm to actually gain strength. We must inform the U.S. President of our intention to demand an immediate emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council and force the United States to discontinue this project at once.”

The listeners asked several questions about the current situation and all agreed to pressure the UN for an immediate meeting.

The Senator nodded as he heard the four leaders discussing the political approach to the current crisis. He smiled to himself as he mulled over the situation. The political solution is no longer viable. I’m glad I have my other network. My associates on the station will either shut it down or destroy it.

_______

Storm Killer – 9:30 AM 

Kim sat opposite Francine in the makeshift interrogation room. Lt. James was releasing Bolino so he could assist in capturing Denuza and regaining station control.

Kim looked at Francine for several moments without saying a word. She continued staring at her until the doctor became uncomfortable and began fidgeting in her seat.

“Sit still, Doctor Cruz. What are you so nervous about?” Kim queried.

“What am I charged with? Why are you holding me?”

“Don’t play dumb, Francine. We know everything. Rafael is your half-brother. We know you and Rafael staged the accident at the mainframe. We know you stole Bolino’s security badge and Rafael used it to access the workstation that loaded the worm. We have Rafael on video loading the worm. We know you gave Bolino a medication that knocked him out while this happened. We know you supplied the anesthetic that knocked me out. What I don’t know is why you decided to take me prisoner. Care to explain that?”

With each statement made by Kim, the Doctor appeared to crumble a little more. She remained quiet.

Kim went on. “Until today, you two were responsible for acts of sabotage and kidnapping. That’s all changed. You two are now responsible for mass murder.”

Francine bolted upright. “Murder? What do you mean? My God, what has he done?”

“Rafael’s appropriation of the station’s control center and his changes to Storm Killer’s targeting caused the deaths of three dozen people on several weather monitoring ships near the hurricane’s eye. And you are his accomplice!”

“No! My God, No!” Francine broke down in tears. “Rafael promised me that no one would be hurt by any of this.”

“Well, Doctor, that promise is long broken, isn’t it? We have less than three hours to get control of the station or our own government will blow us up. Now, why did you two do this? What’s in it for you?”

Francine wrung her hands and in a trembling voice responded, “As you already know, Rafael is my half-brother. Over the years he has become more and more involved with environmentalist groups. He really cares about the Earth and what we have done to it. He knew I was going to be on Storm Killer. He applied for a technical position and was second in line for an assignment. He asked my help in getting selected. It was easy to find some small medical issue with the first choice and get him removed.”

She stopped for second gathering her thoughts and asked for a glass of water. She then continued, “He told me that the Storm Killer concept was considered far too dangerous by a large number of highly respected scientists that were in his latest save-the-environment action group. He told me that the government of Mexico had also expressed major concerns over the USA making any attempt to affect a hurricane.”

She stopped again to take a drink of the glass of water that Kim had brought to her. After a small sip, she started again, “Seems that in the late fifties, the US had attempted to seed the clouds of a hurricane in an experiment to lessen the impact of the storm. Mexico had protested that the US should not be experimenting with a storm that could change direction and hit Mexico and threatened to hold the US responsible for damages caused by such a storm. The international community sided with Mexico and pressured the US to suspend further experimentation.”

“Rafael thought he could cause enough disruption here to give Mexico and her allies time to force an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council and have the Storm Killer project condemned by the UN. At first, he promised me that his various actions would simply stop the activation of Storm Killer. He finally escalated his actions in an attempt to get Storm Killer’s heat ray turned off. He probably knocked you out with anesthetic and tied you up so that your two companions would stop their efforts at stopping him and go looking for you. Although, I don’t know that was his doing for sure, I’m sorry for that, Kim.”

Kim just nodded and ordered the Doctor, “Go on.”

“He said he was going to take over the control room and force the staff to turn the light beam off.”

“Something has gone badly wrong,” Kim replied. “The beam is at full power pointing in exactly the worst place possible. The scientists think the storm will now grow into a monster that cannot be stopped.”

The Doctor looked ill. “I have no control over him anymore. He listened to me in the past and almost always took my advice. Now, it’s like we’re strangers. He even threatened me with having violence done to the rest of our family back in Mexico if I didn’t do exactly what he demanded.” She began sobbing.

Kim grabbed the doctor by her arms and shook her violently. “Stop it! Now is not the time to have a breakdown. You brought this whole thing on yourself by not reporting your brother’s actions. Now we have over thirty innocent people dead on those ships and millions more exposed to unnecessary destruction. Help us get Rafael to give himself up. Before it’s too late for all of us!”

The Doctor sobbed, “Rafael has been out of my control for several months. He keeps saying that his ‘boss’ is running things now. I don’t know who this ‘boss’ is, but apparently it’s someone on the station.”

As this dialog was playing out, Sand and Hoch were watching two sweating technicians, under the direction of Layne Bartlett, carefully drill a small hole in the bulkhead wall of the control center. This was being done with a laser drill to avoid any noise from a drill bit or drill motor. They watched as the techs snaked a small digital camera into the hole and attach the leads to the video inputs of the laptop computer in front of Sand and Hoch.

The closest technician pressed a touch pad on the camera and the picture suddenly appeared on the laptop screen. Using the lead wires, the technicians slowly moved the camera around to see more of the room on the other side of the bulkhead. Layne gasped as he saw his team members sprawled out at each workstation in the room. He couldn’t discern by looking at the picture if they were dead or alive. All that was known was that they saw no one moving, nor apparently conscience. After about five minutes of surveying the interior, it became apparent that Rafael was not in the room.

Layne ordered another crew of technicians to begin cutting through the door. He stood behind them as they began to attack the door with the laser.

Hoch suddenly grabbed Adam’s arm and pointed at the laptop screen. They had panned in for a close up of the interior of the door about to be broken into. There, on the interior of the door, was a device about half a meter square. They saw what appeared to be wires leading to other similar devices wired to the wall of the control center that was exposed to the outer hull of Storm Killer. Each device had letters stenciled on their sides. Hoch focused the camera on one of the devices and the letters became clear. They involuntarily held their breath as they read:

C4 Explosive

M112 1.25 pounds

Store at Temps of -10 to +35 °C.

Adam yelled to Layne to stop cutting the door. Layne tapped the techs’ shoulder and ordered them to stop. He rapidly moved back to view the computer screen.

Hoch exhaled. “Jeez, I haven’t seen this stuff since my military days. I know that M112 designation. It’s definitely a military grade C4 and that much of it can knock out a six-by truck. I’ve seen it happen. It could easily punch a hole in the hull the size of the Grand Canyon and, with the door destroyed, the station would be drained of oxygen in no time. He was way ahead of us again. Getting in there will take time. We’ll have to cut an entrance through the bulkhead.”

Hoch glanced at his watch and muttered, “And we damn sure don’t have the time to be neat about it.”

Layne shoved Sand to the side and picked up the cutting torch. He looked at Sand and Hoch and said, “Get the hell out of here. If something goes wrong, at least you guys have to be able to tell what happened.” He turned to the bulkhead and turned on the laser.

Hoch said, “Hell, no! We aren’t going to leave you to blow yourself up!”

Adam grabbed Hoch’s shoulder and spun him around. “Don’t you think someone should go after Denuza? Since he doesn’t appear to be in the control center, what other mayhem is he planning? I can stay here and help Layne with the cutting.” With that, he gently pushed Hoch toward the door, and then turned to assist Layne in cutting the bulkhead. Without looking back, he said, “Go find him and stop him.”

Hoch stood up and hurried for the door yelling back, “He’s as good as gotten.”

______

Washington, DC. – 9:45 AM
The President entered the briefing room and all assembled personnel rose. He sat, and nodded at the forty-ish woman who was just taking her seat again. “Rose, what is the crisis?”

Rose Magruder, the National Security Advisor, examined her note pad and said, “Mr. President, we have a confirmed situation involving the Storm Killer project. Apparently Storm Killer has lost its targeting control and is now focused on the ocean at the very eye of the storm. The intense heat generated by Storm Killer’s beam of light almost instantly killed thirty-six people on scientific vessels in the eye. Furthermore, NOAA believes that the hurricane is now intensifying because of the added heat to the ocean around the eye. We have contact with the station, but they cannot enter the control room. Someone has taken over the control room and barred the doors.”

The briefing continued with various specialists providing the President with the facts of the situation.

The consensus of scientists was that if Storm Killer continued to focus its concentrated light beam on the ocean water for another twelve hours, the hurricane would strengthen to a category five. He was also advised that Mexico and its neighbor states had already asked for an emergency session of the UN Security Council to place the issue of Storm Killer’s apparent deviations in front of the world.

The President wondered. Where have these people been? My own secretary knew more about goings on aboard Storm Killer than all of these supposed security experts.   

The President asked his security advisor, “Rose, options?”

“Our primary option would be to wait for the security forces on Storm Killer to regain control. If they don’t regain control within the next five hours, I’m afraid we must destroy Storm Killer. We must begin evacuation of Storm Killer personnel immediately. We must notify the UN that we are taking appropriate action to avoid any further strengthening of Hurricane Edna. We must defuse the situation as quickly as possible and avoid the calling of an emergency session of the Security Council.”

The president nodded and simply said, “Do it.”

Rose contacted NASA control and instructed them to pass the evacuation order to the Storm killer crew.

______

Storm Killer - 9:50 AM
Adam received the evacuation order from NASA mission control and called all department heads to begin loading their staff members into the one shuttle already at the station and the other shuttle being launched to their site in the next half hour. It would be tight but they could evacuate all personnel in the three hours granted them in the evacuation order.

He then contacted Lt. James and informed him of the latest developments.

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

36

Interrogation
Hoch hurried back to the interrogation room. Lt. James and Kim were still questioning the Doctor about this ‘boss’ her brother had supposedly mentioned.

Lt. James stood bent over with his face only inches from the doctor’s face. He slammed his hand on the table and bellowed, “Come on, Francine. There is no ‘boss’. You’re just trying to divert your blame in this to some unknown individual that doesn’t even exist.”

“No, that’s not true,” sobbed the doctor. “There is a person on the station that Rafael takes orders from. And it’s not me! He did say that the boss was biding his time until certain events happened that would allow the boss to provide protection for Rafael.”

Hoch signaled to Lt. James from the door and walked out. Lt. James came out of the door a few seconds later and asked, “Does Sands have control of the station?”

“No, the control room is wired with C4 that will detonate if we try to blow the door. Sands is cutting through the bulkhead. It’ll take time,” Hoch replied glancing at his watch. “Time we can’t afford. Look, we have to find Denuza before he does any more damage. The doctor probably knows where he might be, let’s put the pressure on and break her.”

Lt. James nodded and sticking his head back through the door he interrupted Kim’s continuing interrogation. “Kim, Hoch and I need about ten minutes alone with our suspect. We can’t screw around playing with the doctor any more. We need answers and we need them now.”

Kim looked from Lt. James to the doctor. She nodded her head and said, “I understand. What you’re going to have to do shouldn’t have any witnesses. I don’t want to know. But please don’t leave any bruises or scars that can come back on us later.” 

As she said this, the doctor’s eyes grew larger. Kim knew that Lt. James and Hoch would employee some methods that Lt. James had learned while interrogating Middle East terrorists at the Guantánamo Bay detainment camp during their military duty. No marks left on the body, quick breaking of the person, and truthful responses was the fruits of these methods. And he was very skilled in getting results.

“Francine, I feel sorry for you. You would best be served by telling these gentlemen what they want to know before they introduce you to some of their ‘truth techniques’. You’ll not like what’s about to happen if you don’t cooperate fully,” Kim implored.  

With that, she walked out the door and casually said over her shoulder, “Guys, you have ten minutes. I’ll stand guard and ensure you aren’t disturbed. Make sure the noise level is kept down to a minimum.”

Hoch took his plastic ties and secured Doctor Cruz to the chair she was sitting in. Her arms and legs were each tied to an arm or leg of the chair. She was spread eagled and helpless with little ability to move in any direction.

Lt. James had been rummaging around in the small duffle bag he’d brought to the interrogation room earlier in the day and found a section of rubber hose about six feet long and a roll of duct tape. He then duct taped her head to the back of the chair so she could only stare straight ahead.  

He placed one end of the hose in the doctor’s mouth and then taped her mouth closed around the hose but leaving her nostrils open. The other end of the hose was threaded. He removed the aerator from the room’s water faucet and tightened the end of the water hose to the threads of the faucet.

Looking at the results of their labors, Lt. James nodded to Hoch. “Good job. This shouldn’t take long.”

Then, looking at Francine, Lt. James stated, “Okay, Doctor, I’m going to give you a thirty-second treatment. At the end of that time, I’ll ask you some questions. I expect the truth and I expect your full cooperation. If I get neither, your next treatment will be for twice the amount of time. One minute doesn’t sound like much but my personal observation is most people think that it’s a lifetime.”

With that, Lt. James turned the handle of the faucet about two turns and said, “Francine, you’ll become very uncomfortable in the next minute with this water flow of only a couple of turns of the facet. Remember what will happen next time, it will be much longer, and I will turn the water flow up a few more turns. Remember that.”

The doctor was barely listening to him. She had water pouring out of her nose. She could not swallow the water fast enough to keep up with the flow. She felt like she was going to drown. She couldn’t breathe. If she tried to take a breath, she just inhaled water. She began coughing and gagging into the tape holding her mouth closed tightly around the hose. She began to loose consciousness, her eyes were blurring, and her lungs were burning for lack of oxygen when Lt. James turned off the faucet.

He ripped the duct tape off of her mouth and removed the hose. Water poured from her mouth and nose as she struggled to take a gasp of air. He waited a few seconds for her to regain some air and then said, “The next time you go twice as long. If you’re stubborn, the third time I’ll stuff the hose down your throat and fill your stomach with water until you reach the point you’re ready to explode and then punch you in the stomach until you wished you were dead. So save yourself some agony and tell us what we want to know right now.”

Francine tried to nod her head but could not because of the duct tape holding her head to the chair. She finally said in a croaking sound, “I’ll tell you anything I know. Don’t torture me anymore!”

Hoch walked over and began the questioning. “Where would your brother go? Where would he be now?”

Francine, looking desperate, replied, “I don’t know, I don’t know!”

“Now, Francine, let’s try this again. Where is your brother?”

Francine sobbed, “I really don’t know! He didn’t tell me anything about where he was going! I swear I don’t know!”

“Not a good answer, Francine. In fact, that’s a very bad answer. Where do you think he might be?” Lt. James queried.

“I don’t know!” she sobbed. “I’d tell you if I knew! I really would!”

“Make an educated guess. Did he say anything that would suggest somewhere he might go?” Hoch asked.

“God, I- I- I don’t know. I can’t think I am so s…s...cared. G...g...give me a minute, please?” Francine stuttered.

“You have ten seconds. Where would Rafael be right now?” he countered as he began unrolling more duct tape.

The doctor’s eyes widened even more and she said, “I do remember he had talked several times about the international space station treaty and the terms on seeking asylum in different nations territory on the station. He found it hilarious that you could commit first-degree murder and seek asylum in an area under control of one of the nations that didn’t have the death penalty. He even chuckled about spies seeking asylum in friendly nations territory and living out their days in that nation’s territory on the station or even on the ground within that nation’s borders.”

Lt. James said, “So you think he’s on his way, or has made his way, to one of the domains in Core City.”

“Yes, I do. And it would be one of a friendly nations not having the death penalty.”

Hoch and Lt. James exchanged glances and nodded to each other. Lt. James began cutting away the plastic restraints that held the doctor’s extremities to the chair.

He helped the doctor to stand and said, “Hoch, take her to the cell. But on the way, stop by her quarters and let her cleanup some. She looks awful.”

The doctor did, indeed, look awful. Her head was a tangled mat of hair, water and mucus. Her eyes were red and her nose was still dripping liquid. Her clothes were soaked and her balance was all but non-existent.

Lt. James went on, “While you’re doing that, I’m heading for Core City and will try to run this weasel to ground. Join me there as soon as you take care of the good doctor.” Hoch nodded assent and grabbing Francine by the arm, headed out of the door.

Lt. James joined Kim outside the interrogation room. She gave him an inquisitive look. He nodded and said, “Got the info. Come on, we’re going to Core City.”

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

37

Prelude To Death
Rafael received all his instructions from the unknown man he called ‘the boss’ by phone or hand-printed notes left at his two dead drops. These dead drop locations been identified to him by his unknown superior long before Rafael arrived on Storm Killer.

When they needed to exchange communication, they would place an item on the station’s electronic swap board, announcing they had a specific issue of Playboy for swap. If the month of the issue was odd, dead drop 1 was where the communications was stashed. If it was an even month, the communications was at dead drop 2.

He was approaching message dead drop 1. The drop location was simply a small pocket made of duct tape. It was suspended under the right corner of the third pew in the last row within the multi-denomination chapel.

There were two people kneeling in prayer as he entered the chapel. He sat in the third pew and pretended to pray. He waited until both people rose and left the chapel. He quickly reached under the pew, felt for the tape and found the pocket. He extracted a folded piece of paper and slipped it into his trousers pocket.

Rafael rose from the pew and slowly walked to toward the rear of the chapel. As he approached the door, he stopped, turned around to face the altar and said a prayer that no one would be hurt through his past or future actions. He was on his way out when the chaplain entered the chapel. When he saw Rafael, he waved and approached. “Rafael, I’m so glad to see you! Are you as upset as I am about what has transpired? Isn’t it awful? So many dead.”

Rafael immediately felt in peril, his breathing quickened and his heart rate began to increase. “What do you mean? Who’s dead? Where? When? How?”

The chaplain said in a sorrowful voice, “It’s truly terrible. Someone sabotaged the station’s guidance system and Storm Killer has caused the death of many people on Earth. How many is still being determined, but the number is well over two-dozen. It’s so bad that the President has ordered the station be destroyed if our command personnel cannot regain control in a very short time frame. And we lost Sanford Smith, our hydroponics technician, a little earlier when the sabotaged flying lab fell out of Core City. He was killed by shards of broken crystal hitting him like deadly flack. Tragic.”

Rafael’s very soul withered at the mention of so many deaths attributed to his actions. This isn’t the way it is supposed to have happened! I am a murderer! My God, what have I done? Rafael screamed silently to himself.

Rafael staggered toward a pew and pressed his hands to his head.

The chaplain noted Rafael’s face paling and his obvious overwrought reaction to the news. “Rafael, are you alright? Can I get you some water? I know this thing is bad, but you cannot take it so personally!”

“No. Ah. No. I’m all right. Just a little overwhelmed from all of the events and tired from working twenty-four hours straight. You, ah. You know how it is,” Rafael’s speech stumbled badly. With that, Rafael forced a small smile and quickly left the chapel.

The chaplain watched him walk away and turned to deal with his own problems.

Rafael walked to the end of the corridor connecting the chapel to the main public walkway. He stopped, glanced around to ensure his privacy and opened the piece of paper he had retrieved from the chapel.

MEET ME AT CLOSET 21 AT 1000 Hours.

The boss is actually going to meet me? Rafael mulled over in his mind. This had never happened before and based on Rafael’s understanding, it was never suppose to occur. What had happened to require his superior to give up his anonymity?

Rafael felt another electric wave of fear flow through his body. This wasn’t good! The deaths caused by Rafael’s actions in the command and control center must be the reason for the face-to-face meeting.

Rafael glanced at his watch and saw he still had twenty minutes to get to the closet, only ten minutes away.

He began walking toward the closet and suddenly stopped short. A phrase the boss had used once on the phone came back to Rafael. It was a conversation held on Earth about two months before Rafael was to arrive on Storm Killer. The boss had been explaining to him how the dead drops would work. Rafael had asked, “Will I ever actually meet you?”

“No. We’ll never meet. Under no circumstances will you learn my identity! We must maintain anonymity so that if you’re caught and questioned, you’ll not be able to identify me, nor any of my other ‘associates’. We must maintain our security.”

Rafael suddenly felt very confused. The boss had said they would never meet. Now, they were going to meet. Had the deaths caused by his actions made Rafael expendable to his employer? If the boss was determined that protecting his own identity was of paramount importance, why would he suddenly want to meet and allow me to know who he really is? Rafael asked himself.

It was obvious that if anonymity were critical to his boss, then this meeting would mean that the boss thought Rafael would never be able to identify him to anyone. This could only be done by one of two methods, thought Rafael. The boss could show up wearing some disguise so that Rafael couldn’t identify him, or the boss planned that Rafael would be in no condition to pass his identity on to anyone else.

Rafael staggered and grabbed a nearby railing to brace himself from falling. It burst onto Rafael’s thoughts that his life was in danger. The boss had known what the results would be from Rafael’s attack on the command center of Storm Killer. He had known that deaths would occur. The boss was never going to leave him alive once they actually met! He was expendable at this point and was just a loose end to the boss’s plans. Rafael’s breath was now coming in ragged gasps.

He reached in his back pocket and pulled out the small item he had removed from the station’s control console. The item was a single tiny microchip that provided the intelligence to control Storm Killer’s long-term station keeping capabilities. The sub-processor still in the control center had sufficient storage resources to hold only short-term single orbit tactical station keeping data. The unit in Rafael’s hand provided the long-term tactical computational support that refreshed the sub-processor every five minutes.

In less than fifty minutes time, the station would be without any tactical station keeping positional control. The Storm Killer beam would begin to sweep widely around Earth as the station lost position. Either Storm Killer’s station keeping would have to be restored or the beam would have to be cut off. Until that time, Storm Killer’s heat cone would slowly move to the west as the computer attempted to keep the station positioned on one point on the Earth. Without real time updates, the computer would slowly lose the war against the ever increasing computational errors introduced by the lack of updates.

Little did the station crew or Rafael know that Rafael’s “boss” had, a short time before, short-circuited several control systems in the station’s station SKIDS system. There was now no way to turn off the heat and light being reflected and magnified to the ground. The SKIDS would simply continue to properly position the array of polymer film for maximum effect on the ground.

He scanned the area around him. The walls were smooth with no openings. There was nowhere to hide the tiny device.

Rafael looked at the tiny microchip and made an instant decision. He pulled a used chewing gum wrapper from the ever-present pack in his shirt pocket. He pulled the foil wrapper out of the paper sleeve and opened up the paper sleeve. He tightly wrapped the chip in the paper. Then, opening up the foil, he carefully wrapped the chip in the aluminum foil. After inspecting his handiwork, he placed the wrapped chip in his mouth and swallowed it.

The boss could not be allowed to find it, if he, indeed, did incapacitate Rafael. He walked to a small communications console set in a pedestal next to the railing he had been holding on to. He spoke a short voice mail message marked urgent to his sister.

“Sis, I’m sure the boss is going to kill me. I’m to meet him in a few minutes at the closet where I knocked out the policewoman. Tell Adam Sand that I’ve got the station’s missing microchip. I wrapped it in chewing gum wrappers and swallowed it to make sure the boss doesn’t get his hands on it. I’m pretty sure the boss lied when he said the station stores had a replacement chip. I think he’s probably done something with the spares. In a very few minutes the station will be completely out of control. Tell the policewoman she can catch us if she hurries to closet 21. If you can make me vomit up this chip, maybe the station can be saved. Goodbye, sis, I’m so sorry I got you into all of this crap. I love you.”

With that, Rafael hit the buttons that requested immediate delivery of the voice message. The system would locate Francine and deliver the message in a very few minutes. Rafael keyed off the communication pedestal and began a slow walk toward closet 21.



 

 

 

 

 

 

38

Uncontrolled Control
Layne was sweating profusely from the heat generated by the laser torch as it ate through the control room bulkhead. He was now cutting a hole large enough to allow him to enter the room.

He first cut two small holes into the bulkhead. The first was as high up as Layne could reach. To this hole he attached a hose from a compressed air tank rolled in at Layne’s command. The second hole was low on the bulkhead and now held a hose attached to a pump that was pulling the old air from the room beyond. These would force fresh air into the room and help the station’s air system remove the remains of the knockout gas that Denuza had introduced to the room.

The melted piece of bulkhead fell inward at a soft nudge of Layne’s hand. It hit the interior floor with a loud clank. Layne stuck his head through the opening and saw two of the technicians beginning to stir. One was making pawing motions with his hands. Another was kicking wildly at the ceiling with his legs. Both still had their eyes closed and spittle was still running from the corners of their mouths. “The gas must be diluted enough. The technicians are starting to come out from under the gas effects,” thought Bartlett as he worked his way into the control center through the hole he had just cut. The edges of the hole were still extremely hot from the laser torch. He yelled back to Adam, “Watch out, the edges are hot as hell.”

Adam climbed through the hole, while avoiding touching the still hot edges. He stood up and took in the scene before him. Every alarm on the control room’s navigation station was on. Blinking and solid red lights covered the status board at the command station.

Two technicians entered the room behind him and ran to take up positions at the navigation and command consoles. The technicians and Layne became extremely busy as they inspected various output devices and addressed the errors each represented. Within minutes all alarms had ceased. Except for one. Adam reviewed the navigation board and his heart sank. The board indicated that the station-keeping computer that kept the station properly positioned was not receiving any updates from the master navigation computer. This meant that the station-keeping computer had a very limited time before it would be unable to keep the station in any stable position.

The technician on navigation opened an access door, looked inside, and then turned to Layne. He looked terrified as he said, “The master processor chip is missing! We’ve got about fifty minutes before the station’s positioning control ceases.”

Layne immediately opened his cell phone, dialed the quartermaster, and ordered a spare chip be brought up from the station stores. The quartermaster told the tech that a new chip was on the way up and should be there in a couple of minutes.

Layne’s cell phone sounded. The quarter-master’s nervous voice could be heard all over the control center. “There is no spare! The station’s stores inventory says we have two spares. But the bin is empty! Someone must have taken them.”

Bartlett gave Adam a questioning look and then said to the quartermaster, “Keep looking. Maybe they’re just misplaced in another parts bin.”

Adam opened his cell phone and dialed the Security number. Hoch answered, as the cell system had computed that his current location was closest to the caller. Hoch had just delivered the doctor to her residence to clean up from her interrogation.

“Hoch here,” he answered.

“Dan, it’s Adam. The damage to control center is irreparable. Denuza stole a microchip that is critical to station’s control system. The station stores have no spare. We’ve got about fifty minutes before Storm Killer becomes a very dangerous, massive, rogue weapon that will be sweeping lines of destruction, at random, across the face of the Earth. As it is now, she will slowly began drifting her heat beam west. This drift will become more pronounced as the computations become aged due to the lack of fresh updates from the master computer.”

Hoch had noticed the doctor’s cell phone blinking an emergency message arrival as Sands explained the current tactical situation. It could be a medical emergency requiring the doctor’s attention or maybe it was her brother, Hoch thought.

He keyed the phone and heard Denuza’s voice. He immediately yelled into his cell for Sands to be quiet for a second.

He listened to Rafael’s short voicemail to his sister and said to Adam, “I think we know where the chip is at. It’ll take us a few minutes to get it.”

Adam responded, “You have twenty minutes. I need to inform the President. I believe the immediate destruction of Storm Killer is the only way to ensure safety on the ground at this point. I have to go and make that report now. I’m going back to my office to set up the groundside call and I’ll wait twenty minutes. That’s all the time I can give you. Then I’ll ask the President to order our immediate destruction. Let me know as soon as you get the chip back.” Sand hung up.

Hoch keyed Kim’s cell. When Kim answered, Hoch quickly sketched what had just transpired and suggested Kim and Lt. James make haste to closet 21.

They had just arrived at the core elevator and were about to take it to Core City when Kim’s cell rang.

Kim acknowledged the call and hung up her cell phone. To Lt. James she said, “What if this is trap? I don’t think we should just charge in there. But we have only a few precious minutes left.”

He replied, “Kim, we can’t afford caution now. There is way too much at stake. I’ll take the lead and draw any fire from inside the closet. You back me up and take out any one shooting at us.”

Kim couldn’t think of a better plan and so she nodded her head in acceptance. They began running toward closet 21.

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

39

Death Awaits
Rafael cautiously approached the dark entrance to closet 21. He stopped for a moment and looked intently around the interior of the station. He had started this mission full of hope that his actions would help bring the state of the Earth’s environment to the attention of those who most abused it. 

Instead, he had caused the death of many innocent people on the ground and probably all of the staff on Storm Killer. Some of these people were his friends and he felt a bitter sadness that his ‘boss’ had brought this ruin upon his head.

He sighed, took one more look around and walked through closet 21’s entrance. The emergency lamps did not flash on. This did not surprise him. His boss had disabled the lights. He had done the same thing when he wanted the upper hand on Kim Danby.

As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw the shadow of a man leaning against the galley counter on the other side of the shelter. The figure raised a hand and powerful flashlight beam played on Rafael’s face instantly blinding him.

Rafael raised a hand to shield his eyes and stuttered, “B… B… Boss, is that you?”

“Yeah, Rafael, it’s me. You’ve done well. The station is now uncontrolled and will soon cause tremendous damage on the ground. This will end the United States’ attempts at controlling the weather.”

“You promised me that no one would be hurt. Why did you lie to me?” Rafael asked in a trembling voice.

“I didn’t lie. I asked you to disable the station-keeping capability of Storm Killer. The method you selected to accomplish that request is the cause of the deaths on the ground,” the shadowy figure answered.

“But you told me to do it! I was just following your orders!” whined Rafael.

“No. I asked you to disable the station, not kill people. That cross is yours to bear. You did it for both the money we paid you and the religious fervor you have for safeguarding the environment.”

Rafael had to admit that shadowy figure was right. He sighed and admitted, “Yes, I did it for money for my parents. But more importantly, I did it for the environment. I’m at least true to my principles.”

The figure held the flashlight’s intense beam steady on Rafael’s face and laughed. “You fool! The environment was just the hook we used to bring you into this. The real reason we’re doing this is to make the United States look bad in the eyes of the rest of world. Our Central American friends will make considerable progress in diminishing the States’ role in the affairs of other countries by showing it had no qualms about trying to use this unproven and dangerous technology.”

The shadowy figure went on, “Our Central American friends are paying us very well for our services. So Rafael, do y’all see? It’s all about the money for my associates and me. The environmental thing is a dog that don’t hunt as far as I’m concerned!”

The figure suddenly leaned away from the counter and stood straight. “It’s time we parted company, Rafael. Y’all aren’t of any value to us any more.”

Rafael heard the report from the gun, saw the muzzle flash and felt a blow strike his chest as if hit by a sledgehammer.

He crumbled to the floor. He couldn’t breathe and his head was spinning. He was totally numb; he felt nothing and couldn’t move his extremities, nor turn his head. He knew he was dying.

The figure approached him and knelt down to inspect his wound. “I must have hit an artery, you’re bleeding heavily. I imagine you’ll bleed out in a couple of minutes.”

The figure moved his head closer to Rafael’s and the flashlight tipped slightly illuminating the figure’s face.

Rafael recognized the murderer’s face and weakly gasped, “You! I can’t believe you’re behind this!” His right hand was lying in the blood pooling from the wound. Rafael willed his hand to move. He lifted his blood-covered index finger to the side of his tunic and moved his finger slowly up and down his side. The motion was so slow that his assailant failed to notice the movement in the dark room. He then blinked his eyes once as his lifeblood gushed away into an increasingly large pool on the floor. His body became limp, his chest rattled with his last breaths, and his eyes glazed over with a milky film.

The figure smiled and used his fingers to close Rafael’s now dead glazed eyes. He rose and stuck the weapon under his belt in the small of his back. He pulled his work tunic down over the gun. Moving the flashlight around the room, he inspected for anything that would point to his identity. Satisfied that nothing incriminating existed in the room, he strode from the closet and walked briskly toward the closest Core City elevator.

The man had failed to notice he had stepped in the blood pooled around Rafael’s body. Two distinct bloody footprints could be seen leading away from the closet.

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

40

Notifying Groundside
Adam entered his office and sat down at his desk. He punched in the code for Layne’s cell phone. It rang several times.

“Bartlett,” Layne tersely answered.

“Layne? Any change in your status?” Sands asked.

“None. We haven’t found a spare chip. We’re attempting to break into Storm Killer’s SKID controls and try to retract the magnifying film arrays. If that doesn’t work we’ll try to disrupt the position of the magnifying films. If we’re successful, it won’t matter that we’re out of control. The concentrated light beam will either have been turned off, or diminished to a safe level,” Bartlett reported quickly.

“What are your chances of success? And no bullshit, please. I don’t have time for wishful thinking,” Adam replied.

Layne was slow in his response, “I’d say 50-50. The prick locked the SKID system with new passwords. So, we’re trying the known ‘backdoors’ right now. Maybe he didn’t block all of them. Jeff Mattingly, the groundside computer guru, is assisting us remotely.”

Adam knew that every computer system had one or more ‘backdoor’ user entry points to allow service personnel to get around the intricate front-end security mechanisms. He also knew that Mattingly was a world-class computer professional who had led the design team of the SKID control programs. It was likely that if he couldn’t break into the system in time, no one could.

Adam mentally reviewed everything and then said, “You have ten minutes. No more. I’ll tell the President that he should order the immediate destruction of Storm Killer for forty minutes from now, if he hasn’t received a communication to the contrary from me.”

“Got it. Good luck, Adam,” Layne replied.

“You, too, Layne. Do your damnedest to make the deadline,” Adam encouraged him and then pushed the cell phone disconnect. He dialed the phone in the reception area and the constable picked it up on the third ring. “Evacuation area,” he answered.

Adam queried him on the progress of the evacuation. All non-essential personnel were now safely in one of the additional shuttlecraft NASA had dispatched in the last few hours. That was all the fleet they had to send at this time. Japan, Russia, and Great Britain had jointly sent one of their small fleet of shuttles. They were expected in less than fifteen minutes. Because of the tight timeline, there was no time to go through docking and undocking procedures. So, the remaining station residents would have to put on their environmental suits and space walk to their assigned shuttle. Only sixty people remained on the station. Some of these were in involved in the current crisis in some management or support function. The others were scientists and engineers of various nations that were still in Core City. Adam disconnected and reviewed his notes he made during the call.

Adam sat for a moment collecting his thoughts, glanced at his watch, sighed, and pressed the speed dial to the National Security Advisor’s private line. It rang once and was immediately picked up.

“Rose Magruder.”

“Ms. Magruder, its Adam Sand from Storm Killer,” Adam announced himself to her.

“Adam, hang on a second, I need to get Dr. Rosen, he’s our NASA liaison, and will provide technical information to the President based on our assessment,” Rose said.

Adam waited about twenty seconds when Rose came back on the line.

“Adam! I have Dr. Rosen here with me. What’s happening up there? The President is fit to be tied. Several of the resident nations’ staffs on your station have made reports to their governments that sound ominous. He’s being accosted on all sides by these governments for answers. Our television news organizations are running continuous coverage on the situation, and have latched onto these foreign reports. Things are very tense down here!”

“Ms. Magruder, things are bad. I think it’s time for the President to initiate action.” With that lead-in, Adam briefed the National Security Advisor and the NASA representative of the current status.



 

 

 

 

 

 

41

Death
Kim gripped her pistol and moved quickly to the right side of Closet 21’s entrance. Lt. James, holding his weapon close to his body in the classic upright position, slid along the wall to his position on the other side of the entrance. Kim looked into Lt. James’ eyes and with a nod began silently mouthing a countdown, “Three, Two, One, NOW!”

Lt. James, crouching low and leaning forward, did a barrel roll into the pitch-black room. He rolled up onto his feet into a classic hand-weapon-firing position with one knee on the floor with his weapon held level in front of his body as he scanned the darkened room. 

Kim stepped through the door by quickly edging around the entrance’s doorframe. She held her flashlight in the classic police stance: at shoulder height and to the far right of her body. If anyone was to take a shot at the flashlight, chances were they would not hit her. 

She quickly scanned the room with her flashlight. She was also listening for any sounds. Nothing moved in Closet 21’s interior. It was silent as a tomb. The only thing detected by her senses was a strong coppery smell.

Kim’s flashlight beam swept the floor and stopped when it illuminated the body lying in the pool of blood. Lt. James, alert to any movement, was kneeling on the floor no more than three meters from the pool of blood still slowly oozing from the body. Kim thought. Well, I know what the coppery smell is. Fresh blood.  

The body was turned so the head was hidden from the entrance. All that could be seen was that it appeared to be a male in a NASA standard technician’s garb.    

Once they were content that no one was still lurking in the room, they turned their attention to the corpse on the floor. Kim scanned from the dark hole on the back to an area on the wall immediately to the left of the entrance. There on the wall was heavy blood splatter and a mark that could have been where the spent bullet had struck the wall at the end of its murderous flight. She scanned down to the floor under the splatter and to what appeared to be a spent bullet lying at the base of the wall.

Lt. James said in a firm steady voice to the room’s computer support system, “Lights on.” Nothing happened. Lt. James said to Kim, “He must have disabled the light control again.” Lt. James moved cautiously to an emergency light switch on the wall and using his sleeved arm, he pushed the button. The bright light flashing on momentarily blinded the two security officers. They blinked their eyes several times in an attempt to refocus their sight on the body. 

As her eyes adjusted to the bright mercury vapor emergency lamps, Kim was able to take in the whole crime scene. Rafael Denuza lay on his back in blood pooled on the left side of his body. His tunic had a red stained bullet hole just below his heart.       

Lt. James cautiously moved to the right side of Denuza to avoid the blood pool and kneeled beside the body. He carefully reached out two fingers and felt for the large carotid artery in side of Denuza’s neck. After a moment, Lt. James muttered, “Nothing, he’s gone. Based on the amount of clotting of the blood in the pool, he probably bled out only a few minutes ago.”

Kim surveyed the floor between the body and the doorway. She pointed to a set of bloody footprints going from the pool out through the door. She took her cell from her tunic pocket and snapped several pictures of the footprints. The prints’ tread pattern looked like a red waffle iron pattern. She noted with some disappointment to Lt. James, “These appear to be about size nine. The tread appears to be the standard issue work boot we all have.”  

The lieutenant pointed to Rafael’s right side just above the floor. Rafael, using his own blood, had apparently written a single crimson character. It appeared to be the number 8. “It looks like he was trying to tell us something. See what’s on his index finger? It’s covered in blood. Apparently he wrote this single letter or number on his side before he died. It’s either an 8 or a B. I’m not sure which.”

Lt. James took out his phone and speed dialed Hoch. Hoch answered immediately, “Hoch.”

James quickly described the scene. “Denuza is dead. Shot once thru the chest. And he bled out. If he swallowed that control chip, we are going to have to gut him to get to it. Can you get Dr. Cruz over here fast?”

While Lt. James was talking with Hoch, Kim looked closer at the prints and saw a strange anomaly in the design. Apparently, the owner of the shoes had walked someplace where something very sharp existed. Two of the waffle treads on the right foot had a half-inch piece of tread missing where something had cut them. 

Kim snapped several more pictures of the treads, closed up the camera, and put it back in her tunic. As she did so, she mulled over the latest evidence. Apparently our murderer was at the crystal lab crash site. That’s the only place he could have gotten his shoe soles cut like that. It had to be at the same time we were there! The murderer would have little time since to do this crime. Who was there when we were? She mentally ticked off the names of the crew she remembered at the crash site. Christ! Almost all of the station directors were there! Is our murderer one of our own bigwigs? 

Now, where does that bloody 8 on Rafael’s side fit in? Kim thought. 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

42

No Good Options
The President sat at the large, black, executive chair at the head of the mahogany conference table. 

His gray-streaked brown hair was neatly in place even though he felt disheveled. He absent-mindedly tapped his fingertips on the table’s polished surface as his senior advisors explained the current situation on Storm Killer.  

Rose Magruder was speaking, “And, as you can see, Mr. President, Adam Sand’s latest report isn’t promising.”

Dr. Rosen, the presidential science advisor, added, “We must think about the Lincoln’s precarious position. They don’t believe they can clear the area in time to avoid Storm Killer’s death ray. But this has proved that the Storm Killer technology has military value.”

Dr. Rosen was a hawk when it came to application of science advancements as military weapons. He had taught at various colleges over the years, and finally chaired the Physics department at one of the major technical schools on the east coast. His department had run many experimental programs for the United States Army, Navy, and Air Force. He knew of at least eight major weapons systems that had come to fruition as a result of his department’s efforts. But Storm Killer had the potential of being the ultimate non-nuclear weapon. Whole armies could be wiped out by a larger version of Storm Killer.  

Rose now resumed with a discussion of the lack of immediate military options to bring down Storm Killer. “We know the Russians have aimed at least two multi-warhead missiles at Storm Killer. They have always thought of it as a weapons threat. We have no missiles of our own targeted at the station because we never thought of this scenario. We may have to ask the Russians to shoot it down. They’ve been monitoring the situation and have already started readying both missiles in case the Storm Killer beam continues toward them or one of their allies like Cuba.”

Dr. Rosen sighed as he thought, it’s a shame that we must blow up the station. But what needs to be done, must to be done! He was dragged back to the present moment by Rose’s question “Doctor Rosen? Are you with us? Don’t you agree with my summary?” 

Rosen started. “Sorry, Rose. Sorry, Mr. President. I was deep in thought. Yes, I agree with your summary. We should approach the Russians at once and get them to launch their missiles immediately. We have less than forty minutes and it will take them at least a few minutes to launch and at least fifteen minutes for the missiles’ warheads to reach Storm Killer.”  

Rose objected. “I didn’t say we needed to blow it up. What I said was we may have to do that if we cannot regain control quickly. It would be very bad to destroy it at this time.”

The President twisted around in his chair to stare at Rose. “What possible good would it do not to destroy the thing right now?” 

She replied, “If we do get control back, we can use Storm Killer to perform its original mission. Focus the beam back on Hurricane Edna’s eye wall and kill it. Or at least weaken it. We’ve currently got a category five storm only hours from the east coast. If Storm Killer is brought back online in time, it can weaken Edna enough so the east coast will only be hit by a normal hurricane and not the monster we’ve now created.”    

The President pondered his advisors’ statements. His brow knit as he weighed his decision. Either option would be a public relations nightmare. Hell, he thought, the voters will rip me a new one, whichever way I go on this.  

One choice was to wait longer in hopes the skeleton crew still onboard could regain control of the station. If this did not happen in the next few minutes, Storm Killer’s heat ray would probably fry the Lincoln’s personnel and the civilian scientists on board instantaneously. And no telling how much more destruction and how many more deaths would occur.  

His other option was just as bad. Order the immediate destruction of Storm Killer and its remaining crewmembers. A five hundred billion dollar experiment totally destroyed, with nothing to show for it other than a run away hurricane. The voters would love that, too. And to go begging the Russians to blow it up would make the United States look pitifully weak to the watching world.  

Damn, I’m dead meat either way I go on this, the President grumbled to himself. He tapped the table surface with his fingertips a few more moments, made his decision and ordered, “Rose, get the Russian President on the phone. I’ve got some quick begging to do. We’re going to blow it up. We can only hope the east coast can weather Edna in its monster form.” 

Dr. Rosen remained silent and just sat and watched as Rose ran from the room to communications desk to initiate the call to the Russians. He glanced at the President and noted the man’s head was slowly shaking from side to side as if he was struggling internally to reverse his order. 

Rose swept back into the situation room and announced, “Mr. President, the Russian president will be on the phone in two minutes. He’s aware of the Storm Killer situation in amazing detail. It’s almost as if he was sitting here listening to our briefings. I marvel at how much real time intelligence they are able to get from us.”   

The President said, “Okay. From this point on, we run the whole operation from here. I don’t want any communications through NASA. We will issue orders to the remaining crew on Storm Killer. Rose, call NASA and tell them they are to go silent until such time as we relinquish control back to them. Got it? We will provide direct orders to the appropriate senior staff on the station from this room.” 

“Yes, sir. I will call them immediately.” She reached for her phone and began making the ordered call.   

Dr. Rosen stood up and apologized to the President, “Sir, I really must go to the toilet. I’ll only be a moment.” The President never said a word and just nodded his head. Dr. Rosen headed for the men’s room outside of the situation room door. 

He entered the men’s room, a gleaming chrome and white tile domain with four stalls on one side and six urinals hung from the wall on the other side. He bent over and scanned under the stall doors for any feet. None. Good! He thought, nobody here.   

He moved quickly into the stall furthest from the entrance. He sat down on the toilet and pulled his I-phone from his pocket and pressed the 1 speed dial. It rang twice and a deep male voice with a southern twang could be heard, “What?” it enquired.  

Rosen looked at his watch, “It will be destroyed. The President is asking the Russians to launch as I speak with you. I will call again when I know the estimated time of destruction. Do not allow them to get control back! This will probably be all over in the next thirty minutes. Figure out how you two are getting off the station in time. I’d hate to lose my two brightest students. Please, be care---.”   

The voice at the other end cut him off, “Number two and I have already discussed getting off this thing. Remember to call when the countdown starts, I have to go!” 

Rosen disconnected. He had one more call to make. He pulled a small address book from his pocket and looked up the number for the woman he had to contact. He dialed the number, and waited until she answered. 

He said, “This is Dr. Rosen at the White House. The President just wanted me to pass on the following message.” He then read to her the message he had pre-written. “We would like that passed on to the Director, too. Can you please pass it on? Yes? Thank you. Remember you have our backing! Yes, thank you, again. Goodbye!”   

That should confuse the situation! He chuckled to himself.  

Tucking his phone away, he washed his hands and threw some water on his face, and scurried back to the Situation Room. 

“It’s almost over!” he thought with immense pleasure as he re-entered the situation room and heard the President state into the speakerphone in front of him, “Vladimir? Dear friend, I must ask for your country’s immediate assistance.”  

Dr. Rosen’s heart rate skyrocketed as he heard the final piece of the Storm Killer plan snap into place. Yes, it’s almost over. We’ve won! He thought gloating as he listened to the President’s side of the phone call.  

     

     



 

 

 

 

 

 

43

The Chip
Hoch looked at his watch as he walked toward the door of the bathroom where Francine Cruz was cleaning herself up. The Doctor, as a member of the senior staff, had a private bathroom. Everyone else of lower rank used a community unisex bath and toilet facility.

He opened the bathroom door and saw she was in the needle shower. The shower resembled an old steam cabinet. The individual would enter the box and sit down on its wire bench inside the machine. The cabinet door was closed around the neck of the individual and all that could be seen outside of the box was the person’s head. When activated, a series of small ‘needle’ streams of one hundred degree recycled water and body detergent would spray from all sides of the cabinet onto the person’s body. Ten minutes in the shower cabinet was as cleansing and refreshing as an hour-long standard shower Earth-side. 

Francine twisted her head in the cabinet and angrily stared at Hoch. “Can’t I even shower without you watching me?” 

“Doc, they’ve found your brother. He’s dead. We have to extract that chip he swallowed,” Hoch tersely replied. 

Francine shuddered and began sobbing, “Rafael’s dead? No! It can’t be, tell me it isn’t true. My brother’s dead?” Francine opened the shower door, stumbled out, and slipped to the floor. Hoch grabbed the drying towel and threw it over her naked body. Hoch quickly walked to the sink and filled a plastic cup with cold water. He briskly strode over to where the doctor lay fainted and unceremoniously dumped the water over her face and head. A few seconds went by before Dr. Cruz shook her head from side to side, moaned, and hiccupped another sob.      

“Doc, get your ass up!” Hoch urged sharply as he grabbed her under the arms and lifted. “We’ve got ten, maybe fifteen, minutes to extract that chip from your brother’s stomach and get it back into the computer system!” 

Francine slipped back to the floor and sobbed, “My God! You can’t expect me to open up my brother! I don’t care if we live or die, but you can’t and won’t make me do that to his body!” 

Hoch stared at her for a moment as she cried for her dead brother. He lifted his phone from his belt and speed dialed Kim Danby. “Kim? Look, the doctor is in no condition or frame of mind to get that chip.”

Kim replied, “We’re running out of time. We have to get that chip, now!” 

“Well, I guess you or Lt. James will have to open him up.” Hoch stated in a matter of fact manner. He heard Kim’s sharp intake of air as the meaning of his words registered with her.  

Hoch suggested, “Kim, put Lt. James on the phone. He can do it.” 

Kim transferred the call from her phone to the lieutenant’s. She was about to put the phone away when it rang. “Hello?” She answered.

She listened to the caller, “Yes, I know who you are. – Yes, I understand. – This came from him? Okay, sure, I will. Thank you. Goodbye.” 

She dialed a number and waited until it was picked up, “Hi, it’s Kim. Listen. I just got this message from the ground. I can’t give you a direct quote but here is the gist of it.” She explained what the caller had said. “That’s it, okay? – Yes, all of it. I don’t know! I’m just giving you his message. After all, he’s high up in the food change at the White House, so I thought you should know what he said. That’s all! I’ve got to go. Bye.” 

Lt. James hadn’t noticed Kim’s call as other things had transpired while she was talking.     

Hoch looked to the doctor still sprawled on the floor crying heavily. He touched her with his foot to get her attention. When she looked up, Hoch said, “Look, Doc, Lt. James is going to open your brother up and get that chip. You can either tell him how to extract the chip so that the body isn’t terribly mutilated, or the lieutenant will just bumbled his way through it and leave your brother’s body a total mess. So which is it going to be?”  

The doctor continued to lie prone on the floor and shake her head. “No, no, my God no. Oh, Rafael, what has become of us, of me? I can’t let your body be further injured.” she thought. 

Hoch, holding the phone to his ear, listened for several seconds, and replied with a few words. He looked hard at Francine and interrupted her thoughts with, “Last chance, Doc. Lt. James just came on the line and he’s going to do it. He says if you don’t help, he’ll just gut your brother like a pig at slaughter.” Actually Lt. James had only indicated he was on the line and would do the extraction. He was waiting for the doctor to walk him through the procedure. Hoch was playing the odds that he could shock the doctor into cooperation. 

Francine started from her reveries shakily replied, “Okay, okay, you win. Give me the phone.” Her hand shook as she grasped the phone and she implored, “Lt. James? Please follow my instructions precisely. I must ask that you make every attempt to minimize damage to my brother’s body. I, I loved him and wish him some dignity in death. Please?” 

Lt. James tersely concurred and then cut her off from any further conversation with a direct order, “Doctor, no more bullshit, tell me what to do!”

Francine took a few of deep breaths and began directing Lt. James through the relatively simply procedure. 

“My brother said he had swallowed the chip wrapped in a chewing gum wrapper. The standard gum wrapper is foil with an external paper sleeve. The stomach’s hydrochloric acid will have eaten away the paper part of the wrapper, but the foil part should still be okay.” 

Lt, James tersely replied, “Got it. Go on.”   

“Is your knife blade sharp?” Francine asked. “You’ll need to cut through soft tissue and then some heavy muscle. Any relatively sharp blade will do.” Lt. James was suddenly aware that he had nothing to cut with. He told the doctor to hold on a second. He told Kim that they needed a knife. 

She rummaged through the closet’s stores and galley but found no knives other than a butter knife. They were stymied.  What to do? they both thought.



 

 

 

 

 

 

44

Crash Site
The remaining onboard management team had decided to begin clean up of the more perilous crystal knife shards in anticipation that they would shortly regain station control and the evacuated crewmembers would return. 

Reginald O’Donnell had his small team of lab techs and two volunteer senior staff members completing the initial cleanup of the crystal laboratory crash site. They had carefully gathered and stored the larger pieces of broken crystal that were strewn over the interior of Storm Killer. 

We should have another six or seven techs covering the crash site, O’Donnell noted, but the remaining techs had evacuated the station already. We’ll just have to do with what we have.  

He had decided that the remaining clean up of the smaller shards of crystal would have to wait until they could obtain a reinforced vacuum from groundside. The vacuum looked like a regular shop vacuum, but the canister was specially built to withstand the sharp edge of the crystal. One was currently scheduled for shipment to the station on one of the shuttles next week. Until then, the best thing to do would be to cordon off the crash area, Reginald decided.  

He went looking for Greg Ballard to explain the situation. He found him sitting is his cart talking on the phone. As he approached, he heard him say, “I gotta go, too. Thanks! Bye.” Greg disconnected and put his cell in his belt holder.  

“How goes the shards clean up?” Greg asked O’Donnell as he walked up. 

“We’re done for now. We got the big pieces, but the small ones will be a bugger to cleanup. We need to cordon off the area until the right vacuum cleaner arrives from groundside next week.”   

Gregg replied, “Okay, Reggie. I’d run to the station stores and get some of our do-not-enter paper tape and it put up around the area, but I don’t think it matters much any more. Why don’t y’all head for the evacuation staging area? The Russians are about ready to launch a missile at us.”

O’Donnell’s eyes widened, “The Russians? How in the world did they get involved?” 

“Our President asked them to.” 

O’Donnell shook his head and turned to leave. Greg yelled after him, “Y’all have maybe forty minutes to EVA to the shuttle and get away from the station.” 

Greg watched him return to his small crew and speak with them. He pointed to Greg once as he continued to talk and then he pointed to his watch. The crew, with O’Donnell and the other senior staff members in the lead, hurriedly headed for the elevators to go to the hub evacuation area. 

Greg glanced around and, seeing no one left in the area, started his cart and headed toward the control center. He pulled his cell phone from his belt and speed dialed a number. “Listen, I got the word the Russians are going to launch a missile and blow this thing to smithereens. No, they haven’t launched – yet. So, if this station remains out of control for ten or fifteen more minutes, it’s all over. We should think about getting our butts out of here.” 

The voice at the other end seemed to be asking a question. 

Greg replied, “Who told me? Why, our mutual friend told me no more than five minutes ago.”

“Yes,” Greg went on, “I’d say that it came from a reliable source, won’t ya? Y’all know what y’all have to do, right?”

Greg listened for a few seconds and drawled, “Okay. We’ll meet in fifteen minutes at the evacuation area. See ya there.”



 

 

 

 

 

 

45

Edna
Thanks to massive amount of heat that had been introduced at the wrong places in the storm, Edna was increasing strength quickly to a category five storm. In Miami, the scientists at the National Hurricane Center were amazed at how quickly the additional heat at the sea’s surface had caused the storm to strengthen. They were issuing the strongest possible warnings to the entire east coast of the United States to evacuate the beaches and as far as fifteen miles inland.    

The hurricane force winds now extended over two hundred miles from the eye. Rain fell at the rate of five inches an hour for almost three hundred miles from the eye in almost every direction. 

Storm Killer’s misplaced heat effect was best seen by the concentric eye wall cycle changes being observed. 

Normally as a storm intensified, some of the outer rainbands strengthened and organized into a ring of thunderstorms—an outer eyewall. This outer eyewall slowly moves inward and robs the inner eyewall of its needed moisture and wall rotation. Since the strongest winds were located in a hurricane’s eyewall, the storm usually weakens during this eyewall replacement phase, as the inner wall is "choked" by the outer wall. Over time, the new outer eyewall replaces the inner one completely, and the storm re-intensifies. 

This process was not happening in Edna. The inner wall still existed and there were now two outer walls spiraling in to merge with the existing inner wall. Edna’s strength continued to increase. Hurricane chaser aircraft reported gusts of over four hundred kilometers per hour. 

Edna was fast approaching something unprecedented – a storm over four hundred kilometers across with tornado strength winds extending eighty kilometers from the center.

Edna was now pointed right at Palm Beach, Florida. The entire state would be covered by category four and five level winds in less than twenty hours. 

The storm was a monster and still growing. Luckily, the Storm Killer beam was now moving slowly to the west away from the eye wall and vicinity. With time, the storm would diminish slightly with the extra heating removed from the storm’s weather engine.    

Now, the most urgent problem was the cone of heat that would start marching widely across the surface of the Earth as all steering control onboard the station was lost. No point on the Earth below twenty-six degrees north of the equator would be safe.

What was to be a triumph of science was now an agent of disaster. A disaster of such truly biblical proportions that millions could die and whole regions of the Earth be inundated.    

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

46

The Boss
The Boss was sweating. He had received a call from his superior telling him that the station’s destruction was imminent and to take any and all measures necessary to block the crew from regaining control of the station.   

Now, his superior’s orders were echoing through his head. 

Early on in Storm Killer’s construction, he had installed a special snooper program into the phone system’s phone switching array. He could intercept messages from any of the crew and, by simply setting up keywords, have the snooper notify him when any of the trigger words were used in a phone conversation between people he had listed as “people of interest.” 

The system had just notified him by a special ring tone that such an event had occurred. He pushed the speed connect button and listened to the snooper-intercepted conversation. He heard the conversation between Lt. James and the doctor as she began walking him through removing Rafael’s stomach to get to the chip. 

Shit, it’ll only be minutes before they get the chip! How can I stop the control systems reactivation? We’re so close to success! he screamed to himself. Just a few more minutes and the Russians would launch their missiles and it would be all over. 

Damn! They’ll have the chip back. That damned Rafael! The Boss thought, I should’ve waited another hour before killing him, but the security people were getting too close to catching him. At least I was able to buy some time when I had Rafael take that bitch, Danby, out of action for a while in the safety closet. He snickered as he thought about how helpless she must have been.    

How to stop them regaining control? His brain churned. If I can keep the station uncontrolled, then the Russians will launch the missiles. So Storm Killer will be destroyed. So what now? You’ve got advanced academic degrees, for Christ’s sake! Think of something!  

It came to him in flash. He needed to divert the security team’s focus on the chip recovery. This would mean one of them would have to probably die. Which one and how? Okay, one of the higher ups needs to be taken hostage and one of the security team will have to die tying to free the hostage. Who better to take hostage than the station director? The Boss thought as he brewed and stirred the plot in his head. The rest of the plan fell into line very quickly in his mind. Since Danby and Lt. James seemed to be tied at the hip, there was only one logical choice to be the sacrificial lamb.  

Yes, Hoch must be sacrificed! Now, to execute it! The Boss thought as he moved to put his plan in motion. 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

47

On The Lincoln
The motor launches had returned. The crews had boarded the Lincoln and left the small boats adrift. There was no time to lift and stow them.

The Lincoln had dispatched a small, jet powered, all-weather reconnaissance drone and it had covered the distance to the scene of destruction of approximately three hundred kilometers in twenty minutes. They did not send it in a straight line, but rather a slightly curved route that avoided most of Storm Killer’s cone of destruction. 

They had almost lost contact with the drone as it passed through the edge of Storm Killer cone of light and heat. The internal temperature of the drone had risen in less than a minute to over five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Several thermal cutoffs had tripped. They had lost the camera feed and the remote control and telemetry circuits. Luckily, the drone was moving fast enough to be inside the edge of the cone for only ninety seconds. Almost as soon as the drone passed through the cone, the thermals reset and all functions returned.

Upon arriving in visual sight range of the Albatross, the drone rotated its wings by five degrees to increase the wings lifting factors so the drone could fly slower. It decreased it’s speed to just enough to keep it airborne and under control in the heavy storm turbulence. 

Visual and infrared cameras activated, as well as fine grain bounce-back radar system. The data captured by these components was fed back at broadband speed via a real-time satellite communications session. The strength and frequency of the satellite signal ensured it could blast its way through the roughest weather and ground interference. It had successfully operated in a major sunspot cycle that had managed to knock out most of the commercial satellite communications.   

The visual images stunned the observers on the Lincoln. 

The larger vessel, the Albatross, had no paint left on its whole structure. All of the paint was burnt off. Where ropes had laid coiled, only a black ash shadowy image now existed. The openings that had contained windows or portholes appeared to have had the glass completely melted away and the glass now lay in a frozen waterfall below each opening. The glass slump indicated that, for at least a brief period, the air temperature had to have risen to over twenty-four hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

The dead bodies of the crew were clearly visible. They looked shriveled and burnt as if in an intense fire.  

As the drone flew over the Gordon Gunter, the same scene played out.

Also visible was thousands of bodies of sea life surrounding the two dead ships. The boiling of the ocean had killed any sea creatures living in the first one hundred feet of the ocean’s surface. 

The infrared camera was worthless since the hulks of the ships still radiated heat from the blast they had received earlier.

Admiral Olsen stared at the drone monitor and when he saw the glass slump, he knew his idea of using the refrigerator lockers at the bottom of the ship as harbors of safety was frivolous. They’d all die in the moments of that intense heat. Glancing at his watch, the admiral saw they had less than thirty minutes until the front edge of the beam touched them. After that, who cares? he thought, better I keep this to myself. After all, there’s nothing we can do about it now. May our deaths be quick!

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

48

Sacrifice
Brad Bolino keyed his phone and called Security Officer Hoch. Hoch was still in the doctor’s quarters listening as she walked Lt. James through the surgical procedure. 

“Hoch”, the security officer answered. 

“Hoch, listen carefully. This is Bolino. There is a man here in my quarters. He has a gun on me and says he will kill me unless Danby and Lt. James stop their efforts to recover the chip. He is deadly serious and highly agitated.” Bolino excitedly detailed the situation.  

“He says he will give you five minutes to convince him that they have stopped their surgical procedure on Rafael’s body. And he has ways to verify the truth,” Bolino added.

Hoch said, “Give me a minute to contact them and see what I can do. I’ll call you right back.” 

Bolino pleaded, “Okay, but understand this guy’s serious, and says I’ll die in five minutes if you don’t convince him they’ve stopped!”  

Hoch churned the information he had just heard and made his decision. No way was he going to stop the Lieutenant and Danby from recovering the chip.  

He un-holstered his weapon, checked the magazine, pulled the slider to load a round to the firing chamber, ensured the safety was on, and re-holstered it. 

He reached for his phone to call Lt. James and explain what was up but he stopped. Wait! I better not contact the lieutenant by phone. It’s obvious that who ever this bozo is at Bolino’s quarters, he has been eavesdropping on calls made by either Kim or Lt. James. How else would he know that they were operating on Rafael to remove the chip? The bozo might still be listening in to hear when the operation stops. 

He wrote a short note and left it on the doctor’s coffee table. It tersely explained the current situation and that the intruder was holding Bolino hostage to get them to stop the chip recovery.  

He left the doctor talking with Lt. James and trotted out her front door. Bolino’s residence was only about one hundred meters from where he now stood. He briskly moved to the edge of Bolino’s unit that had no exterior views, and silently worked his way to right side of Bolino’s front door.  

He listened intently but heard no sounds from within. Was he too late? Had the maniac already executed Bolino? 

Hoch took out his gun, and flipped off the safety. He took a deep breath and turned the knob on the door. It was not locked. He silently opened the door a few centimeters and stopped. There was still no sound, and no movement from within the residence. He pushed open the door and entered living quarters.  

A quick scan of the living space showed no one. He moved quickly and quietly to the closed bedroom door. He stopped and listened. Again, there was no sound, no hint of life. He tried the doorknob but it was locked from the inside. Hoch gathered his courage and using his shoulder slammed through the locked door. He staggered as he struggled to maintain his balance when the door gave way and he fell inside.

Nothing moved. No one awaited him. He looked down and saw Bolino’s body lying on the floor next to the bed. He was on his back with one arm at his side and the other arm partially under his bed. Damn, I’m too late. The SOB killed him! Hoch thought as he knelt down to check Bolino’s life signs. He placed his fingers over Bolino’s carotid artery and felt for a pulse. The pulse was surprisingly strong. Bolino was still alive!

Hoch was slow to react to the movement from under the edge of the bed. A TASER hit his side and he instantly froze from the muscle contractions it caused. The TASER sparked and hissed for about ten seconds, until its battery charge was exhausted. After four seconds, Hoch became completely disoriented and dropped to the floor here he would remain for several minutes.  

The Boss rose and looked at Hoch. “Too bad.” he thought as he took Hoch’s gun from his frozen hand. He turned the gun, pointed it at Hoch’s chest and pulled the trigger three times. 

Hoch’s chest seemed to explode into a landscape of three bloody craters. Hoch breathed with a rattling sound. He was near death. 

“Now, I gotta have the Director recover his senses, and report to Lt. James and Danby that Hoch had a gun battle with the maniac that was holding him hostage. The plan’s going as slick as bacon grease on fingers!” he thought as he reached for the man’s body on the floor. 

    



 

 

 

 

 

 

49

The Procedure
What could he use to cut Rafael open? They couldn’t be stymied this close to the goal! the Lieutenant thought. 

Suddenly, it hit him. He yelled to Kim, “Go out to the cart and get me that shard of crystal blade you bagged at the lab crash site.”

She sprinted out and was back quickly, carrying the ten-centimeter piece of broken crystal. Handing it to the Lieutenant, she stepped back. Lt. James reported to the doctor that he had a sharp knife and was ready to begin.

 “Wait!” Kim said excitedly as she grabbed the Lieutenant’s arm. “You’re going to need a piece of cloth or something to wrap around one end of that crystal to protect your hand and hold it like a knife.”  

He tore off a part of his shirt and quickly wrapped it around an end of his makeshift blade. He gripped it by the flat top of the blade’s shank.  

 The doctor began her instruction, “We’re trying to locate the stomach, which is in the upper abdomen just below his lower left rib cage. The stomach is attached to the small intestines, so we will use those intestines to find the stomach. First, take your blade and make a deep cut straight down the middle of the abdomen all the way from the rib cage to the pelvis.”

Kim inhaled sharply as the Lieutenant made the incision.

The doctor continued, “Below the skin is fat and muscle. After cutting through them you should enter a cavity or space, the abdominal cavity. You need to open up the fibrous membrane surrounding the cavity. Stick two fingers into the cavity, separate them, and lift up. This will tighten and raise the fibrous membrane so you can cut it open all the way from the rib cage to the pelvis. Now, you should be able to see the liver in the upper abdomen and the intestines beneath and towards the feet. Kim, you have to pull the skin down on each side of the body so the Lieutenant can see what he’s doing. You may have to hold the liver back as well.”

Kim protested, “I can’t. It’s disgusting.”

The doctor replied, “You have to if you want to get the chip.”

Kim took a deep breath and did as instructed feeling the slippery, rubbery skin in her bare hands as she pulled back the skin.

The doctor asked, “Lieutenant, can you see the intestines?”

“I think so, Doc.  Do they look like a coil of snakes?”

“Yes. Now pick up a portion of the intestines and poke a hole through the yellow fatty tissue attached to them. Then pull on the intestines and continue to cut off the fatty membrane as you pull. This will loosen up the intestines. Continue pulling and cutting, but don’t cut through the intestine. Just free it from the fatty membrane. Now, as you pull out the intestines, you will either be working up towards the stomach or down towards the colon. It’s a fifty-fifty chance. We need to be working towards his head. Just pay attention, and start in the other direction if think you’re heading too far towards his feet.”

After working awhile, the Lieutenant sighed and said, “Okay. It seems like I came to a dead end.”

“That’s good. That means you’re in the right area.  The fatty membrane has ended. We’re close. The final part of the intestine is secured in place.”

“So where’s the stomach?”

“It’s still hidden a bit from view. Now that we’ve removed most of the small intestines from the body, you should see another slightly larger snake-like intestine still in place.”

“Yeah, there’s more intestine left inside.”

“There should be one segment running across the body from side to side. It should be dangling over the place where the small intestines used to be.”

“I see it.”

“That is part of the colon. Grab it. The stomach is attached to this colon segment. Pull the colon towards the feet of the body. There will be another yellow fatty membrane. It goes between this colon segment and the stomach. As you pull, you should be able to see the edge of the stomach. It won’t be yellow, but tan-red, similar in color to the intestines.”

“Here it is, I think. It’s like a slightly dilated pouch, a little smaller than a soccer ball. It kind of looks like one of those whoopee cushions.”

”That’s it! Now free up the stomach from the yellow membranes. Then cut through both of its narrowed ends, the esophagus end and the intestine end.

The lieutenant worked in silence for what seemed an eternity. In real time, it was only thirty seconds when he exclaimed, “I got it!”

He lifted the stomach out of Raphael and held it up.   

While Lt. James had worked, Kim had searched for a makeshift container for the stomach and it’s contents. She found a plastic gallon jug of liquid shower soap in the closet’s stores and a large soupspoon in the emergency closet’s small galley. Kim poured the soap down the galley drain. She used the blade of the knife-like crystal shard and easily sliced the jug in half. She discarded the top half and placed the bottom half on the floor next to the Lieutenant.  

They laid the stomach in the jug and Lt. James sliced it open the entire length of the organ. The smell was mild. They both had expected to have trouble breathing, but found there was little odor from the opened stomach. 

Turning the stomach over, he dumped the contents in the jug. Using the soupspoon, the lieutenant stirred the dumped contents, and then he saw the shine of the foil wrapper. 

He reached down and picked up the small packet. He opened the wrapper and saw the computer chip. It appeared to be intact. 

Kim keyed her phone and connected to Layne at the station’s control center. “Layne, we have the chip! We’re finishing up right now and will be in the cart, on our way to you. We’ll be there in three or four minutes!” Layne acknowledged her call and promised to contact Brad and Adam to let them know the good news. With that, Kim disconnected the call.  

While Kim was on the phone, the Lieutenant placed the now deflated stomach and intestines back into Rafael’s abdominal cavity. He folded the flaps of skin back in place and stood up, tired from his labors.  

They ran from the closet and clamored into the cart. Lt. James made a sharp turn at full throttle and the cart leapt forward. Kim held the precious computer chip tightly in her hand as the Lieutenant drove the cart at its top speed toward the control center.        



 

 

 

 

 

 

50

Dominican Republic Awaits
The Dominican Republic government, after communications with the United States’ Hurricane Center in Miami, declared a Hurricane Warning. Storm Killer’s erroneous targeting continued to feed Edna. Edna was projected to move westward and parallel the Haitian coast, with the eye of the storm only twenty to thirty kilometers offshore. 

If the storm kept to its predicted path, the northern coast area of the Dominican Republic would be in Edna’s southeastern quadrant. It would receive the brunt of the strongest part of the storm. The storm surge from the west side of the storm was projected to be between ten- to fifteen-meters high. Almost all of the Haitian north coast would be inundated with water as far as five miles inland.  

While the desperately poor and ineffective government had no way of implementing large-scale evacuations, it did issue orders for all inhabitants of the northern coast of the country to move inland. It was left to each individual to decide whether to evacuate or try and ride out the storm in the flimsy structures they called homes.

In the seaside city of Puerto Plata, Adélaïde and Gérard Simeon were two such people trying to decide what to do.

They were Haitian descendants living in the Dominican Republic. They had been married for fifteen years. They had married when Adélaïde found out she was pregnant with Bernadette, the couple’s flirtatious fifteen-year-old daughter.  

Gérard walked to the kitchen window and yelled for his son, who was playing soccer in the street with his school friends. “Grégoire! Come in! Hurry now!” He turned back to finish his conversation with Adélaïde about the hurricane warning. His eyes fell on the kitchen and dining room of their home. He felt anxiety as he thought about their home and the potential damage this monster storm could bring.

The home was comfortable and clean. By Haitian standards, the home was one of an upper-class family. Adélaïde always wanted to stay in their home during hurricanes. She felt that she should protect their property and personal belongings. He was more rational and always demanded they leave for safer places when storms posed a danger to him and his family. Their possessions could always be replaced over time; his wife, daughter, and young son’s lives were not replaceable.          

Grégoire, the Simeon’s seven-year-old son, ran down the trash-covered street toward the two discarded truck tires salvaged to mark his team’s goal. As his four-boy team’s best attacker, he was running at full-speed with the three defenders chasing after him. Only their goalie stood between him and a point! He stopped short and set up his instep drive kick. The ball soared in a low arc toward the makeshift goal, curving away from the goalie. The goalie threw his body toward the ball and almost succeeded in touching it with his outstretched fingertips as it sailed passed him. 

Score! The young Grégoire danced on his toes with his arms raised in triumph like his favorite professional soccer player always did when he scored. He stopped when he heard his father’s voice calling for him to come home. “Yes, Papa, I’m coming!” the young boy yelled back to his father. 

The boy’s teammates clustered around him and clapped his back and howled in victory. After about five seconds of victory celebration, as with all small boys, they lost interest and began looking for something new to do. Grégoire waved over his shoulder to his friends as he ran home. “Adieu, see you tomorrow!” 

Grégoire knew something was wrong when he walked in the door and saw his parents’ faces. They were concerned about something. His father looked scared. His mother looked like she was ready to cry. 

The little boy thought he had done something wrong to cause his parents such obvious grief, “Mama, Papa, did I do something wrong? Are you mad at me?” 

His mother reached down and picked him up and hugged him close to her bosom. “No, my dear Grégoire! You’ve done nothing wrong. We are just concerned because a very bad storm is coming.” 

She continued to hold him close and he felt like his breath was being forced from his body. Like many seven-year-old boys, he didn’t like showing affection for his mother because he felt embarrassed when she did things like this. But today, he allowed it as he thought, At least my friends aren’t here to see this mama’s boy!   

Finally, Grégoire pleaded, “Mama, let me down. I have to go potty.” 

She released him and he ran toward the toilet. While he did have the need to go, he really just wanted to get some distance between him and his mother before she did something else to embarrass him. 

Just as he closed the door to the bathroom, he heard his mother ask his father, “Shall we stay here, or shall we go?” He didn’t hear his father’s reply.

Gérard looked at Adélaïde and said, “We should go to Mount Isabel before the winds start. Just as we have in other major hurricanes.” 

Mount Isabel was undoubtedly Puerto Plata's most impressive geographic feature, at 2,600-feet high; it was a popular attraction for tourists and locals alike. A statue of Christ, similar to the one in Rio de Janeiro, adorned the mountain. A seven-minute cable car ride, up the nearly vertical slope, provided access to the statue and a small masonry visitor’s center.  

“I’ll call Jacques and find out when they plan to shut down the cable car,” Gérard continued. Jacques, his cousin, was one of the local cable car operators. “He might be able to make one last run to take family members to the top. We’ll take food and water and shelter in the visitor’s center.” Gérard’s uncle owned the visitor’s center. He was sure his uncle would allow blood relatives to use the center as a storm shelter.  

He went on, “If all else fails, we can drive the car to the top.” 

This made Adélaïde shiver. She’d ridden with her husband to the top once right after they were married, and swore she would never do it again if given the choice. The ride had been a hair-raising experience in good weather. She didn’t want to think about trying it in bad weather. Ever! 

At that moment, the front door burst open. With much talking and giggling, Bernadette arrived home in the company of her two neighborhood girl friends. She laughed as her friend, Sara, told her about Henri’s look of love for Bernadette. Bernadette found this amusing because Henri was the school bully, who would lose an IQ contest to a tree stump. Nothing about Henry appealed to Bernadette. He was crude and mean. Bernadette wanted much more than that from her boyfriends. Or should I say, lovers, instead of boyfriends? Bernadette pondered to herself.   

She cut her eyes toward her father. I wonder what Papa would say if he knew I was having sex with two of my boyfriends? He would probably burst a blood vessel! Somehow, Sara had found a supply of birth-control pills. She had supplied them both with the pills for well over a year. 

She giggled at the thought and ran off to her room with her two friends. 

Her father looked as his daughter and her friends disappeared into her room. “She is getting to be a handful. I hope she gives us no trouble when the storm comes,” he said to Adélaïde.

She looked at the closed bedroom door and said, “Yes, no trouble from her for we have enough coming from Edna.”  

In the Haitian-barrio section of the city, Yvon Latortue, returned home from her job as a nurse at the local hospital. She had to get dinner ready for her three children. She smiled as she looked at the three of them sitting at the table doing their homework. 

Yvon was strict with her precious children. They had to complete their homework before dinner, or if too much homework was assigned, they had to finish it before any television would be allowed. Her strictness seemed to have little impact on Henri. 

Henri, her oldest, was a challenging boy. He was always in trouble in school. He was always fighting, bullying, and terrifying the smaller, weaker students. He seemed to be smitten by Bernadette, the Simeon’s daughter. Yvon had met them several times at school activities, but they were in a higher social stratum than her family was. She thought, Henri doesn’t have a chance with that girl. Nor do I really want him to, based on the rumors around town! That Simeon girl is a tramp! 

Jean and Jacques, her two younger children were picking at each other at the table. Jean yelled, “Mama, make him stop! He’s messing up my homework.” Jacques just smiled and continued pulling at Jean’s notebook. 

“Jacques, leave Jean alone! Stop it!” Yvon threatened the ten-year-old boy. Jacques stopped for a second and then started again. Henri looked disgusted with the endless racket and boxed Jacques on the ears. Yvon gasped, “Henri, don’t hit your brother. That’s not nice!”

Henri growled, “Look, old woman, I’m fed up with these two squabbling. If you don’t want to fix it, I will! I’m tired of all of the noise. I’m going out!” Henri got up and headed for the door. “I’ll grab something to eat with the guys.”   

Yvon tried to protest but Henri was through the door and gone before she could even form her argument.  

Jacques sat and rubbed his head where Henri had hit him. There were tears in his eyes but he wasn’t going to cry. He wouldn’t give Henri the pleasure of knowing he’d made Jacques cry. I hate Henri. He’s no brother. He’s just an animal.    

They ate the meal Yvon prepared. It was largely rice, but well flavored with small pieces of meat and cubed vegetables. Yvon had learned to stretch the money she earned nursing to care for her children. Henri seemed to despise her for what he saw as “cheapness” and never failed to tell her.  

Jacques helped Yvon clean up and put things away for the evening. They had just settled in to watching a game show from the United States over the illegal satellite receiver Yvon had purchased on the local black market, when the front door flew open and Henri strode in. He stood in front of the TV and announced, “There’s a hurricane warning underway. We have to find shelter in the next ten to twelve hours!”  

Yvon shook her head at her eldest son. “No, Henri, we will stay here. Our apartment is on the second floor. We have everything we need right here. We will just board up our windows and we’ll be safe.”   

Henri countered, “Mama, the announcement is that this is the mother of all storms. They want everyone to leave the city.”

“No, Henri. I’ll not leave my home. Nor will my children.” 

Henri knew his mother would never leave her home. It was a choice of staying with her and his siblings and probably dying, or run for the hills by himself. I have to think about myself. Henri thought as he moved to his sleeping area in the large bedroom he and his brothers shared. He had to pack a few things. 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

51

Hesitation Removed
Senator Gutierrez pressed the call button on the intercom unit sitting on his immense, hand-carved, Ziricote wood desk. 

He pressed the required four-digit code on the keypad hidden among the ornate figures carved in to the right edge of the desktop. A small, hidden compartment’s panel popped open on the left side of the desktop.  

The artisans who had built his desk had spared no expense in finding the richest native Ziricote wood. The desk was a rich dark brown, with thin wavy black lines like walnut, but with the hardness and color tones of rosewood. 

He had personally supervised the desk’s construction and had fired several wood carvers before finding the two men who finally finished his masterpiece. They had built a special false panel into the top of the desk that opened to reveal a hanging files compartment. The Senator used this space to hold his “eyes only,” ultra confidential files. Most of these were legitimate government related operations, but several were highly volatile non-sanctioned projects, such as the current Storm Killer operation.  

He brushed some lint off the surface of the desk as he waited for his assistant to answer. He loved this desk. 

The Senator reached into the compartment and withdrew the folder marked “Storm Killer.” 

“Yes, Senator?” young Antonio replied to the buzzer. 

The Senator pressed the talk key on the intercom. “I’ve received word that the United Nations Security Council will not be able meet in emergency session in time to deal with the Storm Killer problem.” 

Antonio was already aware of this from his normal government information channels. Apparently, too many council members were unavailable at such short notice. Antonio realized that his employer, having exhausted the political solution, was bound on the illegal espionage solution.  

“I need for you to get our inside man in Washington on the phone for me. Put him through to me as soon as possible,” the Senator requested and released the intercom key.

“Very well, Senator, at once,” Antonio replied and disconnected.   

The Senator read through the background file on his Washington inside man. He was a well-respected member of the scientific community, was well placed within the Storm Killer project advisory team, and was a high-powered member of the White House staff. 

He had been bought and paid for with money from a special government black-ops projects fund controlled by the Senator and his Senate subcommittee. The uses of black ops money were never audited nor reported through any standard government channels. No one in Mexico City would ever know nor question the expenditures.   

There was a knock on the closed office door. “One moment!” the Senator ordered. He quickly replaced the file within the secret compartment and closed the desk panel. Once closed, there was not a hint of the existence of the hidden panel.

“Enter,” The Senator invited. 

His assistant opened the door and entered. He carried a clipboard with several papers held in place. He walked to the desk, laid the clipboard on the desk, turned it so the Senator could examine the contents, and said, “Here’s the latest intelligence from your men on Storm Killer, and your man in the White House. As you can see, the situation deteriorates with each passing minute. Your man at the White House is on line one awaiting your pleasure.”

The Senator quickly scanned the reports, nodded and punched the blinking line one button on his desk phone. 

“Doctor?” The Senator began.

“Yes, sir. This is very bad time to talk. Look things are hectic here right now. We will shortly accomplish our goal. I’m really too busy to spend any t---.” 

The Senator cut off the doctor’s last remark. “Then stop your infernal talking! Just listen! The political path has failed. You will implement Plan Omega. I want the immediate destruction of the space station. Allow enough time to get the remaining crew away from the station and then have the Russians blast it into oblivion. Do you understand your orders?”

“Yes, sir. This shouldn’t be difficult. The President is already talking with the Russians about their aid in annihilating the station. I’ll report back when the missile launches.”  

“Good. Is there any problems that can derail our plans?” the Senator asked.

“The only problem is the onboard security team. They are good, and aggressive. They’ve already recovered the chip. But our number two associate there has gotten it back, at least, for the moment. That required taking out one of the security team.”

“Which one?”

“Hoch.” 

“I really wish it had been Danby. She is far too clever. She may figure out who our inside people are before our objective is met.”

“I would agree. I would discuss it with our number one associate on board and see if he can take her out, but the missile launch is imminent and she can’t possibly stop it at this point.”

“I think it is best if we terminate Ms. Danby immediately. Make it happen!” The Senator snapped the order. 

“As you wish. I’ll go and get the rest of Plan Omega underway, and have our number one take her out immediately. I’ll call you when the missile launches.” With that the doctor hung up.          

The Senator listened to the other end of the line disconnect, and he slowly replaced the phone in the cradle. 

Antonio could not believe that he had just heard a Senator of the Mexican government ordering the destruction of a multi-billion dollar project owned by the United States, and the murder of this Kim Danby person. His numbed brain slowly began grinding out rationale thoughts again. This is madness! I’ve got to stop this somehow! But, how can I stop it? Who can I turn to?  

He turned and almost ran from the room. The Senator failed to notice, as he was deep in thought. 

Antonio leaned his back against the Senator’s office door and tried to restore a sense of calm in his mind. He pondered on who he could contact with the information he had. Who could have immediate effect on the outcome of his employer’s Plan Omega? And who can stop the ordered murder? 

Suddenly it dawned on him, the Senator had mentioned the one person who he feared could upset his plans. Kim Danby! If she was of such concern to his employer that he would order her murder, than maybe she is resourceful enough to undo this horrendous plot. 

Antonio closed up his desk and signed out of the office to the Government Communications Center. He would contact her with his information. Maybe she could save herself and stop the Senator’s plan before all was lost.  

He stopped outside of the Senate office building, pulled out his personal communication device and called his friend at CISEN, the National Security and Investigation Center. CISEN, Mexico’s intelligence, counter-intelligence, and security agency was the Mexican equivalent of the American CIA. 

His friend answered, “Hola, Juan Portillo.”

“Hola Juan. ¿Cómo te va?” Antonio greeted his friend.

“Antonio, speak English, please. Your English is very good. I’m trying to get ready for a job in the CISEN office in Washington. I need the practice!” 

“Very well. Please, I need your help. It is a matter of life or death. I need to speak at once with a security officer onboard the United States’ Storm Killer station. Her name is Kim Danby. I need her direct number,” Antonio explained.

“It will take me a few minutes, my friend,” Juan replied. “I will ring you back!” 

Antonio disconnected and briskly walked toward the communications center. Hopefully, Portillo would come through as he always had in the past. Antonio thought as he walked. He and Portillo had been involved in several government policing actions aimed at shutting down drug-making operations in Senator Gutierrez’s state. They had worked well together and trusted each other completely. That trust was demonstrated by Juan’s immediate spring to action to get the phone number Antonio needed with no questions asked. 

As Antonio approached the front door of the Mexican Communications Center, his communications device beeped that there was an incoming call. He took the device from his belt, punch the receive button and saw it was Juan calling back. 

“Antonio here,” he answered. 

“Here is the number, my friend. Do you have something to write on or do you want me to text it to you?” Juan asked.

“  Text it, please. And might I ask you for one more favor. Can you get the call records for this phone number?” Antonio provided his friend with the number of the Senator’s White house contact. “I’m specifically interested in calls made and received within the last hour. There should be one received from my employer’s office. I need to know what calls were made from that number immediately after that call was received. And can you hurry?”

“Certainly, my friend. Where are you now? You are at the communications center? Good, I will fax the list to you there shortly.”     

“And I thank you. I hope I can tell you why I needed this sometime in the future,” Antonio responded.

“Never mind. All I need to know is that you think you need to talk to this woman. That is enough for me. Let us have dinner in the near future,” Juan replied.

“Yes, certainly dinner,” Antonio said. Then he smiled and added, “Juan, the correct English is ‘let’s have dinner’. Nobody says ‘let us’.”

“Thank you for the correction. These contractions are a real pain in my ass. That’s right is it not – a pain in my ass?” Juan asked.

“You got it, my friend. Just like an American!” Antonio laughed. “Goodbye for now.” 

“Go with God, my good friend,” Juan replied and hung up. 

Antonio glanced at his message display and saw the text message with the phone number. He thought to himself, I hope God does go with me on this. Human life and the protection of Mexico’s image hang in the balance.

He signed in at the desk, showed his senatorial employee credentials, asked them to bring him the fax as soon as it arrived, and shortly found himself sitting in a small phone booth awaiting his call to be put through to Kim Danby. 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

52

Russians To The Rescue
The President quickly briefed the Russian President, Vladimir Korsakov, on the Storm Killer situation. He didn’t have to spend too much time on the briefing since the Russian knew just as much from his own intelligence services as the President did already. The President made his request for the Russians to use their missiles.  

At first, Korsakov refused to admit they even had missiles targeted at Storm Killer. “Mr. President, we have no such missiles. Why would Russia target a peaceful weather research project such as your Storm Killer? We have our own scientists on your station and we know it is not a weapon. Why would we target it?” 

The President sighed, “Vladimir, you would target it because we would target it if roles were reversed. We know from our intelligence community that you have two modified TOPOL-M SS-27 missiles targeted at Storm Killer. I believe your SS-27 is equivalent to our Peacekeeper, which is a multi-warhead weapon. We also know that you have six five hundred and fifty kiloton nuclear warheads loaded on each of the SS-27 targeted on Storm Killer. So, please, don’t deny it. You see, we know!” 

Korsakov sighed and thought, “Our Russian Security is like a sieve. Our people sell our secrets for a few US dollars.” He replied, “Harold, if such a weapons system existed, what would you want of us?”

“I want you to detonate two warheads on Storm Killer. No more than that, we still have a shuttle close by to extract the last of the personnel before we destroy the station. We are sure one warhead would do, but for safety, two are best. More warheads than that, and I fear the dispersion patterns would take out the shuttlecraft.”   

“And if we do this thing, assuming we can find a missile to do it with, what is in it for my country?” Korsakov asked carefully. 

“World thanks and appreciation. You would be the good guys, and I fear we, the United States, will be the bad guy for allowing Storm Killer to even be built.” 

“I think a scientific exchange of the design and manufacturing specifications for the polymer magnifying film used on Storm Killer would be a wonderful token of appreciation from the USA to Mother Russia,” Korsakov proposed.      

The President choked and then caught his breath. The polymer film was the key to some in-plan military applications. Could he trade away such a significant technical edge for the United States? 

He glanced to Rose Magruder and Professor Rosen. He gave them a questioning look. Should he give up the film secrets? 

Doctor Rosen nodded ‘yes’. Rose Magruder simply shrugged her shoulders. 

The President sighed, what the hell, I’ve gotta do it, or we are shit up the creek.    

“Okay Vladimir, it’s a deal. You get the specifications for the film. Now please launch that missile!” 

“Alright, dear friend. Russia will rescue you. I will order the launch at once. It will be a few minutes to set the warhead configuration in the onboard computer. I will have our mission control patch your advisors in when we are ready to launch. Give us ten minutes. Goodbye.” Korsakov said and then hung up. 

The President and his advisors sat quietly as they waited for Russian mission control to call. The President simply stared at the world map on the wall in front of him. Rose doodled on a piece paper, and Professor Rosen placed a hand in his pocket and folded his fingers around his cell phone. As soon as he could, he would sneak off and send his man the word to evacuate the station. 

All’s well! He chuckled to himself.     



 

 

 

 

 

 

53

Saving Hoch
Kim and Lt. James were riding the cart toward the control center when the call from Brad came to Kim’s phone.

“Kim? Please hurry! I was attacked and held hostage. Hoch came to rescue me. I was knocked out and when I came to, the intruder was gone and Hoch is on my bedroom floor, almost dead from gunshots. I think he’s still got a pulse but it’s barely there. Please hurry!” Brad hurriedly said. 

Kim looked sharply at Lt. James and yelled, “Turn the cart! Head to Bolino’s quarters! Hoch has been shot!” The lieutenant didn’t hesitate; he turned the cart ninety degrees and floored the accelerator.

Kim got the whole story from Bolino about the intruder and him wanting them to stop the chip recovery. Apparently Hoch decided to deal with the situation himself. Damn, that was a stupid thing to do! Kim thought to herself. But then she got a wry smile on her face and added, Yeah, about as stupid as me going to the safety closet by myself and getting knocked out and tied up.

Hoch had done exactly what any of the three of them would have done in similar circumstances. 

The cart slid to stop in front of Bolino’s quarters. Bolino was standing at the door awaiting them. He quickly led them into his bedroom where Hoch lay on the floor. A quick check of his life signs proved him to be still alive, but barely.  

Lt. James said, “Look, Kim, you stay here and get the story from Brad. I’ll go get the doctor and bring her back for Hoch. Maybe we can save him.  

Kim nodded as she knelt next to Hoch with her hand on his forehead. “Hurry!” was all she replied. 

Brad stood next to the door as the Lieutenant moved passed him. Brad placed a hand on his shoulder to stop him for a moment and asked, “Did you get the chip?” 

“Yes, Kim has it in her pocket. As soon as I get the doctor, we’ll take it to the control center,“ the lieutenant replied. 

Brad said, “Look, I’m no good to anyone here. Why don’t I take the chip to the center and you guys deal with y’all’s problems here.”

Lt. James mulled it over a few seconds and yelled back to Kim in the bedroom. “Kim! Let’s give the chip to Brad and he can return it to the center while we deal with Hoch. Okay?”

Kim yelled back, “Sure. That’s a good idea. Have Brad come back and get it. I don’t want to leave Hoch alone.”   

Lt. James bounded out of the door and, jumping into his cart, headed at full speed to the doctor’s residence. Brad watched Lt. James drive away. He then turned and walked back toward the bedroom.

Kim saw him come in and reached in her pocket. “Here Brad, this is the chip. Rush it over to the center, okay? Layne knows it’s coming.” Brad took the chip, nodded and walked out.  

She thought, I should check the other rooms for the intruder, but that will have to wait until the doctor gets here. 

She just held Hoch’s hand as he struggled to breathe. She could see the three distinct bullet holes in his chest. They were randomly spaced his chest. Chances were both lungs were damaged. 

Maybe the liver was hit, too. Why try to kill Hoch? The grouping indicates the perp wanted Hoch dead, she thought and a shiver went up her spine. God, I could use another dose of my wonder drugs. I’m wound up so tight, I might just snap.

Kim heard someone entering the room just as the lights went out. She looked up just as a shadowy figure hit her in the back of the head with the butt of Hoch’s gun. That was the last thing she remembered. 



 

 

 

 

 

     

54

Puerto Plata; Flee To The Mountain
The citizens of Puerto Plata scurried to complete their survival preparations before the arrival of the leading edge of Edna. 

Edna was now the strongest category five storm in recorded history. The eye wall winds were sustaining at tornadic levels. And the hurricane had slowed to only ten kilometers an hour. Rainfall amounts in any area Edna went over were expected to range between one-half and one meter.  

The storm’s path was now soldily to the west. Puerto Plata had already begun to feel the effects of the storm’s outer edge. In less than ten hours, the city would be in hurricane-force winds extending over one hundred kilometers from the eye. Within eighteen hours, Edna’s eye would pass a mere twenty kilometers north of the city. For at least eighteen hours, the city would be in the very center of Edna’s hell on Earth.

Adélaïde and Gérard Simeon were almost finished loading the cable car at the base of Mount Isabel. Gérard’s cousin, Jacques, stood shuffling back and forth from one foot to another as he watched them load his car. “Hurry up, Gérard. The winds are starting to pick up. We were ordered to shut down the system when the winds reached thirty-five kilometers per hour. We’re having gusts to almost that now. So we’ve got to go very soon! I’ve got to take you up, come back, and get home before the storm hits. So, move it!” 

Bernadette lumbered from their family sedan toward the cable car gondola trying to carry a large cooler containing ice and pershiable foods. She would lift the cooler, kind of duck walk it a few meters, and stop to rest. When she stopped, she would drop the cooler with a loud bang. 

Gérard went to her aid, and, picking up the cooler, swung it to his shoulder. In a few strides, he had it safely placed in the cable car. 

He yelled, “Grégoire! Come here, time to go!” He looked for his son, as he herded his wife and daughter into the waiting car. 

Grégoire came running from the door of the public toilet as he zipped up his pants, “Yes, Papa, I’m coming. I had to go.”     

As Jacques closed the cable car door, Gérard inspected the supplies and equipment they’d loaded into the car. He knew in his mind that they had everything because Adélaïde had ticked each item off of the list they had made. Nothing was missing, but he was very uneasy that they might have forgotten something important. 

As the gondola left the terminal station and began its steep climb to the top, his wife tried to lighten the moment with a small laugh and said, “Gérard, we have everything and we’ve done everything we could think of to ready ourselves for this, so please ease up! You’ll give yourself an ulcer with all of your worry.” 

He moved close to his wife and embraced her. Together, they stared out the side window of the car as they climbed toward the top. The children were already viewing the scene and the city spread out below them. In the distance was the ocean, but little could be seen of it due to the low, rolling, dark clouds now beginning to stream in from the east. 

They were about half way to the top when a gust of wind struck the gondola. The car bucked and swayed far to the side, pulling the cables almost horizontally from the wheeled tracks on each support column. As the cable tried to pull out, tensioned metal safety stops pressed down on the cable, forcing it back into the wheeled track. The gondola bounced back and the cable tension snapped the car straight up for several meters. Then it fell back and bounced a few times, throwing everyone to the floor. 

The cable motor had detected the release and then the snapping back of the weight of the car. Its design was to interrupt the power until an operator could inspect the car to see why the cable tension had released so suddenly. The gondola was stopped dead about half way up the peak.  

Jacques contacted the motor station at the top of the peak and explained what happened. The motorman said, “The winds is getting very strong up here. I don’t think I should restart the engine to bring you up. Why don’t you turn around and go back?” 

Jacques replied, “We’re coming up. So restart the motor.” 

The motor engaged and the gondola made another forty meters before the winds caused the same problem.

This scenario played out four more times before the car finally made it to the top. Jacques pulled open the door and began helping his cousin’s family unload the car. As Gérard moved the last of the supplies to the visitor center, Jacques walked into the motor room. He and the motorman discussed their options in getting back down the mountain. 

The motorman suggested, “Look, Jacques, I want off this mountain. I want to be home with my family when this storm hits. I’ll tie off the circuit breakers and remove the cable tension sensor. That should get us back down. I’ll leave my car here since the clouds are already covering the road. You can drive me home. Okay?” 

Jacques agreed, “Do it and let’s go. The winds are far higher than I like.”

It took the motorman only a minute to disengage all the safety devices. While he was doing this, Jacques went to talk to Gérard. 

“Jacques, it isn’t safe to go back down. Feel the wind? The gusts must be much higher than when we came up. Just stay with us here,” Gérard asked his cousin in an urgent voice.  

“No, no. Thanks, cousin, but I want to be home. You understand, don’t you?” 

Jacques stopped as the motorman came up and told him that the motor room was secure and he was ready to go. Jacques grabbed Gérard’s hand and shook it. “Goodbye, cousin. Be safe!” 

Jacques and the motorman bolted for the gondola. Just as he closed the switch engaging the mechanical hands that gripped the moving cable, another strong gust of wind hit. The gondola bounced and caromed several times off the side of the terminal building. The cable groaned from the extra load. With the safety devices bypassed, the motor continued moving the cable and the gondola rocketed from the terminal as the cable sprung back into its normal track. 

The wind gusts seemed to be increasing in length and intensity by the second. Rain had begun falling and the raindrops felt like small bee stings as they landed on Gérard’s face and hands. He turned and ran to the visitor center as the gondola disappeared over the edge of the terminal that extended out from the top of the mountain.  

As another gust of wind caught the car and pushed it sideways, the occupants of the car began to scream. 

The cable twisted and three strands of the ten that made up the cable were cut by the sharp edge of the metal safety stop that had worked loose after months of daily operations of the cable car. The cut part of the cable caught between the turning wheel and the metal stop, resulting in the cable binding into a gnarled mass of useless metal.  

The safety-bypassed motor continued to run, stretching the cable, as the portion caught was jammed tighter and tighter into the support tower’s cable wheel on the downhill side. The tension reached the breaking point and the cable snapped at the damaged section. 

The gondola fell, crashing through the trees, bouncing over and over, broken glass and metal leaving a trail of wreckage. It came to rest against a large boulder. Other than the wind, nothing could be heard.      

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

55

Suicide
Francine had completed the chip removal procedure with the lieutenant. She had divorced her mind from the idea that the procedure was being performed on her brother’s corpse. She had mentally turned it into a medical procedure on an unknown person. 

Now that it was over, the actuality of what had happened came flooding back into her mind. 

Instead of disconnecting the cell call with the lieutenant, she had simply turned off her PCD. She tossed the device onto the floor and slowly walked into the dispensary. 

She opened a locked cabinet, scanned the contents, and removed a bottle. She read the label - Seconal capsules, 1.5-grain. Seconal, also known as “reds”, was more than capable of achieving Francine’s immediate goal. A dozen of the tablets should do it, she thought, but to make sure, I’ll take fifteen. I’ll just drift away and be rid of all of this pain.  

She walked back toward her bedroom and stopped at her desk. She picked up a spiral-ring writing tablet and a pen.      She continued into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. 

She started writing a letter to her parents explaining how she was involved in her brother’s death and the deaths of all those innocent people groundside. She had only written a few sentences that were mostly variations of - “I’m sorry, please forgive me,” when she burst into tears. Sobs racked her body as grief completely overcame her. 

She threw herself on the bed and let the tears flow. All she could think about was how she had failed her brother. 

Her mind was in turmoil as she thought, I should’ve been stronger and convinced him to give up his plan for discrediting the Storm Killer project. I could’ve saved him. Now, it’s too late. 

Now, I’ll just end my own suffering, she swore to herself as she reached to the nightstand for the vial of sleeping tablets.



      

 

 

 

 

 

56

Resignation
The Russian self-propelled mobile missile launcher crew was very efficient. They had the warhead configuration completed in less than three minutes. Only two of the six warheads would be armed. Attachment arms swung out from the side of the launcher housing the missile to remove the other warheads. When the arms attached, automatic releases on the warheads triggered releasing them from the missile. The arms moved straight back and the four extra warheads pulled out of the electrical connections inside the missile’s payload bays. The warheads moved via conveyor belts to a secured storage area at the base of the launcher.

The active warheads had their countermeasures packages activated. These evasion packages were designed to allow the warheads to alter course to evade anti-ballistic missiles. The Russians had programmed these packages to use their course changing ability to provide the final ‘fine tuning’ of the ballistic portion of the one-way trip to Storm Killer. This fine-tuning capability would ensure the warheads exploded within five hundred meters of the station. 

The targeting computers had been fed the weight changes from the removal of the extra warheads. The targeting computer had plotted the intercept course and laid the course plan into the missiles’ guidance computer. The guidance computer would command the missile’s powered flight. 

After the engine’s shutdown, Sir Isaac Newton would be in charge. The missile would become a ballistic object at the mercy and rules of Newton’s laws of action/reaction and gravity. 

The powered part of the flight would last about two minutes. The remaining eighteen minutes of travel to the target would be under Newton’s rules, except for those few seconds when the countermeasure packages fired their small rocket engines to fine-tune the final ballistic trajectory.

The Russian president reported back to the White House situation room. “Mr. President, the missile’s warheads are configured. We are completing the guidance computations and will be ready to launch in a little over two minutes from now.”    

The President sat ramrod straight in his executive chair. He was very unhappy about being backed into this no-win position he found himself in at the moment. 

I need some new advisors. This band of idiots failed to consider a scenario like this might occur, the President thought as he waited for the moment to launch the Russian missile. At least I can use these two as scapegoats, his thoughts churned as he eyed his soon-to-be-ex national security and science advisors across the table.    

The President replied to his Russian counterpart, “Thank you, Vladimir. As soon as you are ready, I will give you the go ahead to launch.”  

“Alright, my friend, it will be just a few more moments,” the Russian replied. 

The President muted the telephone, looked down at the table and said, “I want both of your resignations on my desk within the hour.”  

The two advisors’ heads snapped up and their eyes focused on the President. Each reacted in a different manner. 

Rose Magruder simply sighed and mumbled, “Yes, sir.”  

Dr. Rosen stood up, looked very offended, and in a raised voice declared, “Mr. President, why would you ask for my resignation? I’ve been very upfront with you on my objections to this project from the very beginning. I have done nothing that warrants my resignation!”   

The President stood up and leaned over the table resting his hands on the table. His straight arms and his furrowed brow were the only indications of how irritated he was at the moment. His New England upbringing came to the forefront as he dressed down his ex-science advisor. 

“You academics don’t understand how the game is played, Dr Rosen. You serve at the pleasure of the President. And at the moment, the President is not pleased. At the moment, I need to lay the blame for this whole mess on bad advice. And you, Dr. Rosen, have never said not to build the damn thing. You simply said that you thought there were better ways to spend the funds! You never said the thing would never work, or that the thing was too dangerous. So in omission lays your failure. I expect your resignation within the hour.” 

With that the President sat down, dropped his eyes to papers in front of him on the table, and he began reading the fax he had received. The Russians had faxed a joint statement worked out between the President’s on-duty communications office staff member and the Russian president’s counterpart. The statement outlined the situation, the request for assistance, and descriptions of several of the agreements made between the United Sates and Russia in exchange for the destruction of Storm Killer. The most important agreements were secret and would not be released for the world’s news consumption.          

This press announcement would be released at the moment Storm Killer’s destruction was confirmed. 

That official confirmation would come from the small 18 inch Schmidt telescope on Mt. Palomar in California. The scope, along with two others, had been requisitioned months before to take a series of photos of Storm Killer as it began its first live mission. Due to the position of the sun, this single scope would have the best view of Storm Killer at the time of the warhead’s arrival.  

Dr. Rosen was irate. How dare this weak-kneed excuse for a world leader fire me!    

He rose from his chair, looked again at the President, shook his head, and walked to the small office adjacent to the situation room that was assigned to the senior advisors. It was a sparse space with two desks and the normal mandatory workstations. Rows of briefing books were stacked in a neat row above each desk. 

He dropped into the first empty chair he came to and stared at the empty desktop in front of him. As he sat considering his options, Rose Magruder entered and took a seat at the other desk in the small office.  

She pulled the keyboard toward her and started logging on the workstation. She entered her user id and password and waited for the system to prompt for her identity verification. 

The words popped on the workstation screen:

PLACE THUMB IN SCANNER -- WAITING… 
She stopped, as she was about to press her thumb into the fingerprint scanner. She looked at Dr. Rosen huddled in his chair and quietly asked, “Dr. Rosen? Are you going to prepare your resignation, or would you like me to type one for you?” 

The man turned toward her with a look that shocked Rose. “No. I’ll do it myself. I’ve got a few words for that idiot that I need to formulate properly as part of my letter.” 

Rose did not reply. Rosen was obviously very upset and would probably do or say something that would just exacerbate the situation. Rose finished her log on and opening the word processing application, began typing the resignation letter the President had demanded. Christ, I’m a forty-two year old woman with no family and no job, she said to herself.

The tears in her eyes made it difficult to type and focus on the words forming on the screen. She had given up her personal life to advance her career. 

This job had been the zenith of that career. 

She had divorced a wonderful man five years ago because he had refused to accept being a lower priority in her life than her career. 

She remembered it like it was yesterday. She had just returned home from a three-week tour of non-operative Russian nuclear materials production reactors. This was part of the United Nations inspection team tasked with verification that defunct facilities were truly defunct. She had come through the front door, dropped her bags, and fallen into her favorite overstuffed chair in their comfortable family room.   

He had walked in and handed her a whisky on the rocks. He had simply remarked, “We have to talk.”

He sat in his easy chair, his eyes boring into Rose’s. He said, in a matter of fact manner as he swirled the ice in his glass with his index finger, “I want a divorce. I’ve found someone new who loves me more than anything else. She doesn’t put her career ahead of her family. I want to be with her and she wants to be me. I mean really be with me, twenty-four seven, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.” He stopped and looked down at the ice in his drink glass. 

Rose had cried, yelled, plead, cajoled, ranted, raved, and, eventually, relented. She knew he was right. She wanted to be king of the hill in her chosen career. She had wanted power. She had wanted no encumbrances to achieving her goal.            

She had even given up raising her two children because their needs interfered with the needs of her career. They lived full-time with her ex-husband and his new wife. She saw them for two weeks during their schools’ summer vacations and for a week at Christmas every other year. She sent the mandatory birthday presents and made the mandatory phone calls to them on those days. 

Now, it was all over. She had reached the giddy heights of power. The President was right. He needed a scapegoat. She would do nicely as one of the sacrificial lambs. 

Who would hire someone whose decisions had helped lead to such chaos? She asked herself as she mentally shrugged her shoulders. She finished the resignation letter, printed it out, signed it, and put it in an envelope. She stuffed it in her purse and planned to hand it to the President as soon as confirmation came in that the Russian missile had destroyed Storm Killer.    

She turned off the workstation and headed from the room. She turned and looked at Dr. Rosen. He had started working on his letter of resignation with a none-too-happy expression on his face. She gave him no further thought and left to prepare her for own future. 

Dr. Rosen had reached some conclusions in his anger. He would not say anything in the letter of resignation other than he was resigning. But he would get even with this presidential idiot. His orders from Mexico City were to destroy the project. He would do that for the money. But, he could ensure that the station was destroyed with a compliment of crew still onboard. He would do that in personal vengeance on the President. He mentally laughed. The President would find his political career totally in ruins when these unnecessary deaths were added on top of the rest of this debacle. 

“Too bad,” Dr Rosen mumbled, “but I’ll have to sacrifice my favorite students.” 

  

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

57

Puerto Plata: At Home
Yvon Latortue and her two youngest children were settled in their apartment. The picture window that looked out on the ocean was covered with plywood from the inside. She could find no one to help her cover the window from the outside.  

Yvon had laid in extra water and some canned foods. She hoped it would be enough once the storm passed. She’d spent all of her cash obtaining the meager supplies she had been able to get. The merchants had tripled and even quadrupled their prices in anticipation of the storm causing high public demand for their goods.  

She was now nestled on her sofa with her two youngest children. Henri, her oldest child, had run off the night before and had not returned. Yvon had put on a brave face for her two other children, but inside she was crushed that Henri had abandoned her and his siblings. 

She and the children were watching the Dominican TV station that was now constantly broadcasting storm-related information. She listened over the sound of the TV to the angry wind that had risen in the last half hour. The eye of the storm was still hours away, yet the sounds made by the storm were already menacing.  

She prayed that they would survive the storm. 

After he left his mother’s apartment, Henri took shelter with two local petty criminals simply known as Pablo and Pancho. They lived on the top floor of a decrepit apartment building in the oldest part of the city near the warehouses on the docks. There was no electrical power in the building, so the effects of the storm would be minimal on their lifestyle. They lived by candlelight and flashlight at night. The flashlights were only used when they went on what they called their “shopping trips.”  These trips were made three or four times a week and usually always resulted in someone’s store or home being burglarized. 

Pablo and Pancho were seventeen-year-old twins from a broken home. Their father, a large man who worked as a longshoreman, left them five years earlier after finding his wife in bed with another man. He’d beaten her so badly that she had been hospitalized for several weeks. He had beaten the man to death with his bare hands. He was now serving a twenty-year to life prison sentence for the beating and the death. Their mother had become a prostitute simply to survive and provide money to feed and clothe herself and her sons.  

Pablo went to the corner bar and bought three cases of Cerveza Presidente beer, a loaf of bread and a gallon of rice with sweet corn. Pancho found some flashlights and batteries. 

Henri was given the job of finding enough cooked chicken to share between the three of them. He failed to procure this, but as he passed an army truck parked next to the local police station, he glanced into the back and saw something promising. Quickly looking around and seeing no one about, he stepped into the back of the truck and raised a tarp that lay over some boxes. The boxes were all marked, United States Army – MRE.  

MRE, or Meal Ready to Eat, was an individual ration issued by the United States military for its service-members in combat where field kitchens weren’t available.  The Dominican government was moving cases of these to areas they felt would be hardest hit.  

Henri grabbed a case and carried and dragged it back to the brothers’ lodgings in the abandoned apartment building. 

He presented the case to the brothers and stood back as they opened it with a crowbar they used for their night time “shopping.” As they opened the case, Henri explained where he had found it.  

The case contained one hundred and forty-four MRE packages of chicken breast dinners. 

Henri succeeded beyond his wildest dreams! The brothers clapped him on the back and congratulated him on his “shopping skills.” Pablo handed him a warm beer and pointed to the tattered sofa.  

Henri was then accepted as a resident of the brothers’ home.   

They prepared for the storm by moving the sofa into the elevator lobby in the center of the building. At least then maybe they would stay dry.   

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

58

Treachery
Lt. James entered Francine’s quarters. He found her sitting on her bed with a writing tablet. An unopened bottle of sleeping tablets lay next to her leg. She had been writing in the tablet when he entered. She looked up sharply at him and snarled, “What the hell you do want? Can’t you just leave me alone?”

He picked up the bottle of pills and read the label, “You planning on taking a long nap?”

She reached up and attempted to grab the bottle away from him. He moved a step backward and shook his head. “No, Francine. This isn’t the right way to deal with what’s happened.” 

She broke down in tears. “My brother’s dead. My career is over. My family will hate me for what’s happened.” 

The lieutenant grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her gently. “You’re right. Your life, as you knew it, is over. You will serve some time in prison for your part in this mess, but yours’ is a minor role. The more you do to assist us now, the better it will look to the judge when you face the music.”             

She stared at him and cautiously asked, “What do you want?”

“Hoch has been shot. I need you to get your emergency pack and come with me. He’s still alive. Kim is watching him. Please, help us. Help him!”

Francine waved him away, “I can’t. I’m done. You know what I was doing when you came in? I was writing a letter to my folks trying to explain what happened. I was also saying goodbye. I just want to die. Please, just let me---.”

“You’re still a doctor, act like one,” he yelled at her. He picked her up and threw her over his shoulder. 

“Damn you, do your professional duty! Save Hoch’s life, and then, if you still want to commit suicide, I’ll help you do yourself in,” he yelled as he placed her in passenger seat of the emergency medical cart. He ran around to the other side and, holding her wrist with one hand, started the cart and began driving back to Hoch with the other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

59

Launch
Two aides had brought the latest FBI, CIA, and NSA progress reports on finding the Storm Killer plotters to the doors of the situation room and handed them to Rose. She scanned them quickly and then took them to the President. She placed them on his right side near his hand. He looked up from the call he was taking and nodded as he began scanning the first report’s executive briefing page. He hung up the phone and continued reading. He finished the first report and sighed thinking, another three hundred-word FBI executive summary that boils down to saying nothing new.

The President had been on another line with NASA engineers getting the timeline required to ensure the station’s crew could be evacuated to safety before the warhead arrived.  

The telephone in front of the President came to life with the sound of the un-muting of the phone at the other end of the line.  

“Mr. President? Are you there?” queried his Russian counterpart. 

“Yes, Vladimir. I’m here,” answered the President. 

“We are ready. The launch can occur anytime between one minute from now and fifteen minutes from now. After that, we must update the guidance computer’s data. Once launched, it will take about eighteen minutes to hit the target, give or take twenty seconds.”

The President glanced at the wall chronometer and noted the time. If Storm Killer could be destroyed within twenty-nine minutes and thirty-five seconds, the Lincoln would be spared.  

The President’s voice struggled to maintain its smooth tenor as he replied, “Launch it in exactly ten minutes. We will instruct our onboard crew to abandon the station immediately. My technical guys at NASA tell me that is enough to time to suit up, EVA to the waiting shuttle, and have the shuttle move out of range of the explosion.”   

“Very well, Mr. President.” 

The President pointed to Rose, “Call Adam Sand on the station and tell him to move their rear ends to the shuttle. Now!”

Rose got up from her chair; speed dialed Adam Sand’s number, and walked back toward the senior advisors’ office as it rang. 

“Adam Sand here,” Sand answered on the second ring.

“Adam, this is Rose Magruder, please confirm my voice and my phone number,” Rose ordered. 

Adam knew her voice and glancing at the caller id, saw that it was Rose’s cell that had called him. 

“Verified to my satisfaction, Rose,” Adam replied.

“The missile launches in just under four minutes. You have about twenty-seven minutes to EVA to the shuttle and get out of there before all hell breaks loose.” 

Sand sat stunned. They’re really going to blow up a five hundred billion dollar project!  

Rose said, “Adam? Did you get that? Twenty-seven minutes. Get going!”

Adam responded through the mental fog he was in, “Got it, Rose. I’m so sorry.” 

“So am I. Now go!” Rose ordered as she broke the connection.

Dr. Rosen had walked into the office during Rose’s conversation with Sand. He had searched through the volumes of briefing papers over the first desk and found a very large, heavy, hard-backed 3-ring binder. It was exactly what he was looking for. He laid it on the desk as Rose was finishing her conversation     

He looked around outside the office door, shut it, picked up the binder, and walked over to Rose as if to show her something in the binder.

Without saying a word, he raised the binder and swung it like a baseball bat. It caught her in the temple just above the left ear. She fell to her knees. He swung again from above with all of strength he could muster. He caught her at the base of the head where it connects to the neck. He thought he heard a crack of bone as the binder made impact. Rose fell face first to the floor; blood was dripping from her nose.  

He grabbed her body by the arms and pulled it into the knee space under the furthest desk in the office. He pulled one of the chairs to the front of the desk. A casual observer at the door would not notice her body. 

He picked up her phone and hit the re-dial of the last number. Adam Sand immediately answered. 

“Sand here.” 

“Adam, this is Dr. Rosen. I am here in the White House situation room. Rose was a little ahead of herself telling you the missile had launched. The President has decided to give you folks every possible second to regain control up there. We’ll hold the launch for at least another twenty minutes. So good luck in getting control back!”  

Adam breathed a sigh of relief. Good, I got a little more time to fix this mess! 

Adam said, “Thanks Dr. Rosen. But, why’d Rose tell me that just seconds ago?”

Rosen didn’t hesitate as he lied, “Ah, Adam, it’s awful. Rose was asked to resign at the end of this crisis. It hit her very hard. She hasn’t been herself since the President asked for her resignation. We think the stress and strain just got to her.”   

Adam was shocked. He knew Rose Magruder very well and she was as tough as anyone Adam had ever met. But with the relief of knowing his creation had been given a little more life, Adam dropped his thoughts of Rose and began to concentrate on getting Storm Killer under control in the time he had been given.

“I’m sorry for her, Dr. Rosen. When this is over, I’d like to help her in any way I can,” Adam said.

“As we all do, Adam. Now go fix this situation! Best of luck!” Dr. Rosen said and disconnected.  

Dr. Rosen threw the phone in Rose’s purse. He noted the envelope addressed to the President and pulled it out. He threw the purse in an empty file drawer, and closed the office door on his way out.

He stepped back into the situation room and sat down. The President asked, “Where’s Rose? Did she get in touch with the station?”

Dr. Rosen extracted the envelope with Rose’s letter of resignation and handed it to the President saying, “Rose gave Adam Sand the instructions for evacuation, and then she handed me this and asked me to give it to you. She left after that.”

The President opened the envelope and pulled out the letter. He saw that it was the resignation he had asked for and put it the side. He cleared his throat and stated, “I would have thought Rose would have had the guts to deliver that to me personally. Shows how much I know about human nature.” 

There was silence for a few seconds and then the phone’s speaker rattled again as the Russian president declared, “It is done. The launch order is given.” 

The President seemed to shrink down in his chair. He looked physically ill as his voice quivered, “Thank you, Vladimir. Thank you very much. We’ll now wait for our confirmation of destruction.”    

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

60

Back On The Lincoln
The admiral watched the Storm Killer cone approach slowly from the east. The cone was less than sixty kilometers away. The heat could already be felt even at this distance. The sea roiled and boiled. Steam shot up as gigantic geysers from the churning sea.

The end was near. 

The crew had been sent to the refrigerated lockers deep in the bowels of the Lincoln. The admiral and the bridge crew would be going down in a few minutes. They needed to bring the ship to a full stop and batten down the ship’s bridge. The ship would float at the mercy of the ocean currents and Edna’s winds until the Navy could send recovery crews after the heat cone passed over. 

The admiral thought, the recovery crew will find no one left alive when they arrive. We’ll all be charcoal and black smudges by that time. No one can live through what’s coming our way. What a marvelous weapons system that thing in the sky would make. 

He had written letters to his wife, two daughters, and son. In each, he had told them what was happening, what would happen, and that he would always love them and to be brave and happy in life after he was dead. He had told his children how much he had hoped to be a grandfather, but that it did not appear to be in the cards for him. He wrote his wife about the one time he had cheated on her over twenty years ago and pled for her forgiveness.     

The bridge crew finished their tasks and moved slowly toward the lower decks. Each officer was savoring the last moments of his or her lives.  

The cone of death was now only fifty-five kilometers away.

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

61

Discovery
Lt. James braked to a stop in front of Brad Bolino’s quarters. He got out of the cart without releasing Francine’s wrist. Walking around the front of the cart, he pulled the doctor out and all but dragged her through the front door.

“Kim! I’ve got the doc!” he yelled as they entered. Nothing. No response.  

He released the doctor and drew his weapon from the holster. He moved to the bedroom door. The interior was dark. He stopped and listened for any sound from within. He heard Hoch’s labored breathing and his occasional moan. Of Kim, there was no sound. 

He slowly reached in and flicked the light switch. The lights came on flooding the room. Lying next to Hoch was Kim’s body. Lt. James was shocked and scared that she had been attacked and was dead or dying. He ran to her side and saw the bruise on her head. He could see she was breathing and what he thought were moans from Hoch were actually her moans. 

“Francine, get your butt in here! You have two patients.” 

Francine entered the room and hurried to Kim’s side. She checked Kim’s vitals and announced, “Kim should be okay. Get my bag from the cart. Hurry!”   

She turned her attention to Hoch. 

It took the lieutenant less than fifteen seconds to retrieve the bag and deliver it to the doctor. She opened it, rummaged for some particular medical items and began working on Hoch. Before she had turned to Hoch, she threw Lt. James a capsule of ammonia. “Here, break this under Kim’s nose. This should revive her.”

He did and it did. Kim inhaled sharply and began coughing as the ammonia attacked her nasal passages. Her eyes fluttered open and she saw Lt. James holding her head in his arm and looking down into her face with a look mixed in concern and desire. She was wonderfully happy just to continue to snuggle in his arm. 

He waved the capsule again under her nose drawing another round of coughing from Kim. That effectively ended the fantasy she was living in at that moment. 

He helped her to her feet and moved her slowly to the edge of the bed. She sat down heavily and held her head in her hands. He looked down as the doctor continued working on Hoch. She had started an IV and was injecting something into the IV line. The doctor talked over her shoulder as she worked. “He lost a lot of blood, his right lung is useless, his left lung is not in much better shape, and his liver is punctured. The bullets went all the way through his body and imbedded in the floor. I need to start him on several units of blood plasma and a unit of his whole blood ASAP. It’s a good thing that all of you chose to store several units of your whole blood when you first arrived here.

I’m giving him a broad-spectrum antibiotic to fight infections. I’m also going to give him a sedative to knock him out.” 

“No, don’t,” Kim and Lt. James, yelled at the same moment.

He explained to the doctor, “We need to try to get him to tell us what happened and who did this.” 

“He’s almost in a coma for Christ sake!” Francine replied angrily. “You want me to keep him alive, or just alive long enough to answer your questions?”  

“Wake him up,” the lieutenant ordered in the way of reply to her question.

Francine grimaced, hesitated, and reached into her bag for another injection. She pushed the hypodermic’s contents into the IV. “He’ll be groggy and maybe incoherent. He’ll only be awake for a few minutes, so make your time count!” 

They all stared at Hoch’s inert form. Slowly, he began to slowly move his arms in a pawing motion. His eyelids fluttered and opened to small slits. He lay motionless for a few seconds and then opened his eyes wider. His eyes darted rapidly left to right. He finally seemed to focus on the doctor’s face. He appeared to recognize her. 

Lt. James leaned down and Hoch’s eyes focused on his face. The lieutenant asked, “Hoch, do you hear me?”

Hoch nodded his head.

“Can you try to answer a couple of questions?”

Hoch nodded and his voice croaked, “I’ll try.” He licked his lips. Francine wiped his dry lips with a wet cloth to moisten them and Hoch attempted a small smile in gratitude.

“Hoch, who did this to you?”

Hoch croaked out a sound. He tried again to say something but only a noise came out. 

He suddenly seemed to tense up and his body went rigid. His eyes seemed to have a wild, frightened look as he moved his gaze from Kim to Lt. James and back. He opened his mouth and a low moan of exhaling air was the only sound he made. His eyes glazed over into a dull film. As Kim watched those eyes, she saw the life leave his body. And then, he was gone.  

 

    



 

 

        

 

 

 

62

In Flight
The mobile launcher was parked in a quiet dairy farm’s south pasture ten kilometers outside the city of Chelyabinsk. A small herd of Brown Swiss cattle grazed nearby. 

The TOPOL-M SS-27 missile’s main solid fuel engine ignited with a roar. The engine built thrust as the holding clamps restrained the roaring beast. At four seconds after engine ignition, an electrical current was removed from the solenoids keeping the holding clamps closed, and they released with a metallic snap. The missile literally leaped from the enclosed silo of the mobile launcher with a spreading white cloud of expended fuel.

The cattle scattered, running away from the roaring beast sitting in their field. It would be many days before their owner would get a decent milking from them.

The internal guidance system utilized a combination of a strap down inertial navigation system and a global positioning system. As the inertial system’s normal error rate began to grow over time, the GPS sampling was used to compensate for the errors. Using this combination made the initialization phase of the inertial system much shorter thus making quick missile launches much more of a reality. The quicker a launch could take place, the less chance of compromise of the missile. 

In this case, the system was performing flawlessly. The missile was, at five miles up, accelerating through two thousand kilometers per hour, and right on course. The Russian launch specialist noted all of this on his flight log as he interpreted the in-flight navigation sensor readings being sent by telemetry back to the mobile launcher.

The launcher crew had formally named the missile “Tanya”, but they called her the Russian affectionate form “Tanechka”. 

It would be a glorious flight for our Tanechka, thought the launch specialist. 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

     

 

  

63

Chip, Chip, Who’s Got The Chip?
As Hoch expired, the doctor began working frantically in a futile attempt to resuscitate him. She worked for several minutes as Kim and the lieutenant looked on. Kim’s phone rang once during this time, she glanced at the caller id and saw it was a call from outside the United States. 

It can wait, she thought. It will have to wait. She just let it ring through to her voice mail. 

Francine had been on her knees this whole time working on Hoch. She finally sighed and set back on her feet with her legs folded under her. She turned to look at the two security officers, “He’s gone. There is nothing I can do.” 

Lt. James had been standing next to the couch. He dropped down on it with a look of resignation. Kim just stood frozen next to the doctor.  

The Doctor gathered her instruments and packed them in her emergency kit. She stood up, slung the kit's strap over her shoulder, and seemed to want to say something, but instead simply turned away and left the room. After the attempt to save Hoch, she knew life was too precious for her to ever take her own.

Lt. James cleared his throat and started to say something when his cell rang.

“James.” He answered.

“Lieutenant, where in hell is the chip?” Layne Bartlett all but shouted through the phone. 

“Bolino left to bring it to you at least five minutes ago. He isn’t there yet?” the lieutenant replied. 

“No, he’s not. Find him and get the chip back here, pronto!” Layne said and hung up. 

Kim snapped her fingers and said, “I got a call when the doctor was trying to save Hoch. I’ll bet it was Brad!” She pulled her phone off her belt holder and keyed up the missed call. “Oh, no, I remember, it was a call from Mexico. Not from Brad.” 

She saw there was a voice message waiting, she was too short on time to key through the lists to see who sent it to her. “Wait, I have a voice message, maybe that one is from Brad.” She said as she keyed the message play. 

“Officer Danby? This is Antonio De La Cruz. I am the personal assistant to Mexican Senator Gutierrez. I have urgent information about your situation! I know who the mastermind is! Please call me at once, please. Here is my number.” The lieutenant saw her eyes widen as she listened to the message. She listened to the number and immediately dialed it. Lt. James started to say something and stopped when she held up her hand. De la Cruz had answered.

“Antonio De La Cruz. Is that you, Officer Danby?” 

“Yes, Mr. De La Cruz. You say you have information?” Kim replied.

Antonio got right to the point. “Someone I know and care about is involved in some highly illegal and immoral activities regarding your Storm Killer project. I don’t wish for that person’s involvement to become public. Everything I tell you are based on that requirement. Do I make myself clear?” 

”Very clear. But I cannot guarantee anonymity or immunity if his identity is uncovered via our normal investigations. It is the rule of inevitable discovery.” Kim replied.

“I’m a lawyer and understand that. I simply want you to know that I’ll not disclose this person, or how they came to be involved in this tragedy,” Antonio stated.  

“Agreed.”

“Certain people in the Mexico wish to have Storm Killer fail and to fail in a spectacular way. They have enlisted the aid of a Dr. Rosen, your President’s Senior Science Advisor. You will find an offshore account in the Caymans with two hundred million dollars owned by Dr. Rosen.”    

“How do you know this?” Kim asked.

“Never mind. Just be aware that I do know things you need to know.”

“Do you have proof?”

“Yes, there are files of the account set up and wire transfers from Mexico city to that account. But the proof is not important right now. You are running out of time. The Russian missile will be launched soon,” Antonio continued.

“Russian missile launched! What missile?”  

“You don’t know about the missile? My god, woman, what kind of operation is the United States running up there? Your President requested the Russians to launch one of their missiles and blow Storm Killer apart. The Russians will be launching in few minutes if they have not already. Didn’t your operations people tell you of the launch?”

“Ah, no.” Kim replied.

“This is my last piece of information. Dr. Rosen has at least two accomplices onboard your station. I simply know them as Number One and Number Two. I have a list of calls coming that were made from Dr. Rosen’s phone immediately after the Mexico conspirators’ conversation with him a little over an hour ago. As soon as I get the list, I will fax the it to your PCD.”

“Thank you, Mr. De La Cruz. I will be awaiting that list. Good bye for now,” Kim said as she disconnected. 

She quickly briefed the lieutenant on the content of the call with De La Cruz. His mouth dropped open when he heard the mastermind’s name and position. It dropped even further when he heard about the missile.   

“What the hell is wrong with ground control? Are they just going to let us get vaporized by a nuke? That’s cold, very cold,” he yelled as he paced around the room. He stopped and turned to Kim. “Jeez, we have two saboteurs onboard? Who the hell can we trust?”

The lieutenant made a snap decision, “We have to trust someone. My gut tells me that Adam Sand is a straight shooter. I’m going to bring him in on this.” 

Kim grabbed his hand as he reached for his phone. “Are you sure? Hell, I don’t have a clue who to trust anymore. I’m pretty sure that one of the senior staff is at least one of the conspirators. I’m not sure which one yet, but it had to be one of them at the crystal lab crash site. She explained her reasoning about the bloody shoe prints and the missing portions of the soles of the murder’s shoes. 

Lt. James nodded. “Yes, that sounds like good logic. So one or more of our directors is involved in this plot. Hmmm.” He walked around the room slowly with his hand rubbing his chin as he thought through Kim’s reading of some of the clues. 

He stopped and turned to her. “Okay, what about the 8 or B on Rafael’s side?” 

Kim replied, “Well, that could be anything. It might be a red herring left by the murderer to confuse us. Or, it might be a number for a locker or room, like safety closet 8, or it might be the initial of the perp. It could mean anything or nothing.”   

The lieutenant countered, “If it is an initial, then it might be Ballard, Bolino, or Bartlett. And there are still at least two techs on the station whose last name starts with a B. Still too many suspects! But at least it doesn’t point to Adam Sand in any way I can figure out.”    

Lt. James called Adam Sand. “Adam? Lt. James here. We just got reliable word that the Russians have or will shortly launch a missile targeted at Storm Killer. Do you know anything about it?” 

Adam was shocked that word of the missile had apparently leaked already. Should I deny or confirm? He wondered. There was nothing to gain by denying it. “Yes,” he responded, “the Russians have been asked to launch a missile. I received word about five minutes ago that the missile had launched, but then I got another call stating it had not launched, yet.” 

“Can you verify it? Our source believes the missile launch has already happened,” the lieutenant asked. 

“Of course. Give me a minute. I’ll call you right back.” Adam hung up. 

Adam dialed Dr. Rosen’s number, a Washington DC area code, and got a fast busy signal indicating all circuits were tied up to the Washington DC area exchanges. Rose’s phone was a New York area code, maybe it would ring through. He took a chance and dialed her number. Maybe she’s back, or maybe Rosen still has her phone, he thought as he listened to her phone begin to ring. Little did he know that there would be many rings before anyone would answer that phone.  



 

   

 

 

 

 

64

Puerto Plata: The Height Of The Storm
The rain was falling in torrents. At moments, as the wind whipped the sheets of water into a fine spray, visbility was down to less than ten meters.   

As Edna approached the islands’ northern most point, the water surged five miles inland. At the coast, the surge was almost thirteen meters above sea level. The sea extended all the way through the city to base of the mountain. The crashed gondola containing the bodies of the motorman and Gérard’s cousin was submerged in three meters of water. 

The surge had increased in height very quickly. So quickly, that many people were caught without time to make it to higher ground. The water, muddy brown from silt, was filled with debris of the city. Everything from soggy paper trash to dead chickens could be seen floating and tumbling in the churning waters. Occasionally, human bodies could be seen as a wave broke over it. An arm, or leg, would flop loosely through the top the wave, indicating another human tragedy caused by this monster storm.     

At the home of Yvon Latortue, the force of the wind had blown out the picture window and had pushed the board’s nails out of the wall. Rain and wind were whipping through the apartment unhindered. Yvon and her young children had nowhere to go, so she improvised a tenuous shelter under an old tarp behind the sofa. Even on the third floor, debris flew through the air, flinging it through the open window space. A large shard of a construction two by four imbedded itself in the wall behind the sofa. 

Yvon was unsure when that two by four had blown in. Time now was just a vague concept. The overpowering feeling was that time was standing still and the storm’s hell would go on forever. She laid her body across the top of the children and prayed for the hell to end. Please! End this! I can’t take anymore! She heard the apartment building groan as the water level reached toward the third floor. Waves lapped just beneath her storm-battered apartment. How much more can this building withstand? The water is almost to my window! Thoughts passed through her mind about the two families that lived under her on the second floor. Their apartments were already submerged. Had they survived?

She pulled her children’s bodies closer to her and waited for the end. The first large wave lapped over the bottom of the apartment’s shattered window splashing through the room.    

Adélaïde and Gérard Simeon listened to the wind roaring around the visitor’s center atop Mount Isabel. The large panes of glass looking out on the Christ statue were still in one piece but not for much longer, Gérard thought. He glanced at his son and daughter, hoping his fears didn’t show.  

The Christ statue was a smaller, but still colossal, version of the world famous one in Rio de Janeiro. It was mounted on a half-dome sphere of masonry. The statue had Christ’s arms extended to his sides as if welcoming people to him.    

They watched as the statue began to bend at its base. As the wind worked the statue loose from the base, the Simeon family became almost hypnotized at the event unfolding in front of them. 

The statue managed to survive until a wind gust approaching four hundred kilometers an hour tore it from its base. The statute’s outstretched arms became small but effective wings as the statue lifted into the air and flew through the plate glass of visitor center. 

Christ’s head rammed into Gérard, crushing him against the rear wall. Blood poured from his open mouth around his half bitten off tongue as he expired. The statue caught Adélaïde and pinned her under its back. She was still breathing, but her lifeblood slowly oozed away and was long dead by the time rescuers arrived at the top of the mountain.  

The two children’s deaths were the most remarkable and later reported in newspapers around the world. The statue’s right hand caught the son, Grégoire, just below the base of his skull and literally tore his head off. The left hand crushed Bernadette against the reception desk. It killed her instantly and also killed the three-week-old fetus she was carrying. 

It was as if the statue was getting retribution against the family for some unknown sins. 

Edna took her latest victims without a qualm and was hungry for more.

Henri crawled to the edge of the apartment’s glass doors and peered out a gaping hole where, less than ten minutes ago, a balcony had been. Now, he could see his mother’s apartment building in the distance. 

He was frightened by what he saw. The ugly, boiling sea covered the city’s downtown almost to the third floor of the buildings there. Several buildings had already crashed into the frothing water as their foundations crumbled from the relentless stress of water and wind. 

The all-but-condemned apartment building he was in rocked back and forth in a frightening motion as the water crashed around it. 

The two brothers consumed most of the beer they’d bought and went in search of loot in the closed shops of the downtown area. They were drunkenly inspecting some costume jewelry in one of the many closed shops in the main shopping district when the storm surge hit. Instead of running for higher ground, they tried to make their way back to the dilapidated apartment building which already had a three-meter wall of water running passed it. They drowned, panicked.

Henri was completely alone as the storm mounted to its full fury. 

The rain stung his face as he squinted to see his mother’s apartment building. Henri’s heart leaped to his throat when he saw the first waves invade the third floor windows of her building. Oh, my Jesus, please keep my family safe. Please let them live, Henri prayed.   

He heard the sound of timber splitting and a deep groaning noise as his building’s lower floors began buckling from the stress of the pounding seawater. He continued to stare at his family home as a large wave covered the entire third floor. He groaned and held his sides as he watched his family’s floor covered in the angry water. 

The condemned building began collapsing, and Henri’s last view before falling into the boiling sea was of his family home also tipping and beginning to slide into the sea. 

Edna added to her count of victims.    

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

65

Missile
Tanechka was flying flawlessly. She jettisoned her spent first stage after the solid rocket propellant was completely used. The large, empty piece of hardware fell back to the Earth’s surface and collided with a peat bog in southern Kazakhstan, leaving a large, smoking crater. 

Two young boys playing in a nearby field saw it fall and ran as fast as their small legs could go to see what had fallen from the sky. They knew no fear as they clamored down into the crater to investigate the hunk of metal. The boys died immediately, victims of breathing the noxious fumes still emanating from the now discarded military junk. Their names were added to those of the other innocent victims of the Storm Killer tragedy.   

Tanechka’s second stage was scheduled to burn for one minute and twenty-nine seconds. It ignited in silence, since there was no atmosphere to carry sound, as ninety-nine percent of the Earth’s atmosphere was below its current height. The engine gimbaled to steer her toward her orbital insertion point. She achieved the same orbit as Storm Killer and quickly came up to her target from behind. 

Her Russian caretakers set up the program so that the two warheads would be released in thirty-second intervals at fifty-five kilometers from the target. Their own steering thrusters were used to fine-tune their trajectories into the doomed Storm Killer station. Once within four hundred meters of the doomed station, the warheads would detonate. The thirty-second delay ensured that the second warhead wouldn’t be accidentally destroyed by the detonation of the first warhead. 

Tanechka’s internal computers were sampled and telemetry sent back to her mobile launcher. The Russian launch specialist sampled the data and wrote in the logbook, on course, engine variables within spec. All is well. 

Fifteen minutes and forty-five seconds until warhead release, and then another two minutes and twenty seconds of flight by the warheads. Then, Storm Killer would be no more.        

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

66

Verification
Rose Magruder was lying in a sun-drenched field of crimson red poppies. She felt wonderfully warm and sleepy. The only intrusion was the intermittent ringing sound that seemed to occur every few seconds. What was that noise interfering with my peace and quiet? She thought in annoyance. Why can’t people leave me alone? Who would be trying to call me? 

Call me? It’s my phone! It suddenly dawned on Rose the annoying ringing was the familiar ring tone of her communications device. As she struggled to get up out of her lovely field of flowers, the field dissolved leaving blackness and pain. Her head was throbbing, she could taste something salty on her lips, and her body felt confined. She tried to lift her right hand and found that it was stuck between her back and the metal surface behind her. She worked her hand free and touched her lips. They were wet. She touched her nostrils and felt the same wetness. My nose is bleeding. I wonder why?   

She tentatively opened her eyes and more pain shot through her head. She was somewhere that was semi-dark. She could see dark shapes but couldn’t tell what they were. She seemed to be stuffed into a confined space in some metal box with one open side. What happened? Where am I? I need to rest a little longer. Rose closed her eyes in an attempt to relieve some of the pain in her head. Maybe a little nap would help. 

The phone continuous ringing brought her out of her lethargy. My phone! I have to answer it. It could be important. It could be an update on Storm Killer.  

Storm Killer? Oh, my God! I remember! Everything came flooding back to Rose. The Storm Killer crisis, the resignation request, and Dr. Rosen’s attack! All of this came back to her in a flash. 

She looked around and finally figured out she was crammed under a desk. She could see the legs of the chair pushed in front of the desk. She unwound her legs from under the desk and used them to push the chair away. She gently extracted herself and arose to a kneeling position. Her head hurt and she could not focus her eyes very well.

She followed the ringing and finally located her phone stuffed in her purse and inside a file cabinet. She swayed slightly has she answered the phone. “Hello.” 

She heard Adam Sand’s voice, “Rose, are you okay? Dr. Rosen said you had a melt down of some sort?” 

She shook her head in an attempt to clear some of the cobwebs. “Adam, Rosen attacked me! He hit me with something heavy and I’ve just now come to.”  

Adam asked, “Rosen? Hit you? Why? Jesus, what is going on? Has everyone gone off the deep end?” 

He continued, “Rose, I have to verify that the missile has not launched yet.” 

“What do you mean, ‘Not launched yet’? They launched when I gave you the warning to get out of there!”   

Adam slumped in his chair and spoke. “But Dr. Rosen called me back only a minute after you told me that and said things were on hold. That the President was going to give us every minute he could to regain control. And, and you had apparently had a breakdown of some sort.”   

“Oh, my God, Adam. Get everyone out of there, now!” Rose pleaded. 

“It’s too late, Rose. We don’t have time. You’ll have to get the President to abort the missile. He’ll just have to trust that we’ll get control of this station in time. If he doesn’t abort, then he just killed another two dozen people up here.”  

There was silence on the line for a few seconds, finally Adam said, “Rose? Rose? Are you still with me?” 

Rose had almost fallen from a passing vertigo attack and now felt nauseous, but she managed a reply, “Yes, Adam. I’m here, just feeling pretty shaky and sick.”

Adam was relieved to hear she was still with him. “Rose, you have to get to the President! Go! I’ll do what I can here, but go before it’s too late!”

Adam hung up. Rose was left holding a dead phone as she swayed back and forth. 

Okay, I got to get to the situation room. Rose thought as she walked unsteadily to the office door. Pulling it open she slowly made her way toward the situation room. 

The situation room was at the end of hall. Large plate glass windows looked out on the hall from the room. She could see the President’s back as he sat at the conference table awaiting the news of Storm Killer’s destruction. Dr. Rosen was seated to the right facing the windows. He looked up and saw her staggering toward the room. The look on his face was between surprise and panic.

She was almost at the door when another vertigo attack hit her. She swayed, fell against the hall wall, bounced and slipped to the floor. The last thing she remembered was thinking, Maybe just a few seconds of rest and then I’ll go talk to the President.            

 



     

 

 

 

 

 

67

Flight
Dr. Rosen glanced up and saw Rose Magruder staggering toward the situation room. An electric shock went through his body as he thought. She’s still alive? How? I hit her hard -- twice! 

Now panic started to set in. She was moving in a slow wobbly gait toward the door. She would be to the room in seconds. What the hell am I going to do now? How do I stop her? 

It was at that moment that Rose blacked out and fell to the hall floor. Dr. Rosen sighed in relief. But the relief was short lived. The hall was a busy place; someone would probably find her in short time. Rosen glanced at his watch and struggled for a decision. He finally made it. 

“Mr. President, I have served you as well as I could. I’m sorry that this project ended our relationship.” Reaching in his packet, Dr. Rosen extracted his letter of resignation and presented it to the President. “Here is my resignation. I don’t believe my services are needed any longer now that the missile is on the way. The decisions are made and done. I cannot stand to hear first hand of the destruction of what could be a marvelous weapons system. If you will excuse me, I will take my leave.” 

The President gave an almost imperceptible nod and placed the resignation letter next to Rose’s on the table. He then replied in a terse tone, “Fine. Go. You’re done.” 

Rosen stood and handed the President another document. “This is a proposal for using the Storm Killer technology in a wide range of military applications. Whoever replaces me should review it and present its pros and cons to you as soon as possible. In fact, you may wish to review it while you wait for the destruction verification.”   

The President took the thick document and sat it on the table in front of him. “I’ll review it, but I doubt if any application of this technology will occur in my remaining time in the White House. Not after this debacle becomes public knowledge.”  

“Good bye, sir,” Rosen said and, picking up his briefcase, walked briskly out the door behind the President. The President never looked around to see him go. If he had, he would have seen Rose sprawled on the hall floor. 

Dr. Rosen made his way swiftly past where Rose lay unconscious and continued briskly to the elevator. He pressed the up button and after what seemed an eternity, the elevator car door opened. Two Air Force light colonels exited the car and turned left down the aisle towards the Chairman of Joint Chiefs’ operations office. They never looked to the right where the situation room was located and did not see Rose’s inert form lying there in the hall.  

Rosen had frozen when the door opened and the two officers got off. He breathed a sigh of relief when they turned the other direction and continued on their way.  

He entered the elevator and pressed the ground floor button. In less than thirty seconds, he was raised the ten floors to the ground level. Alan Hardy, the President’s Chief of Staff, entered the elevator as Rosen exited it. They nodded at each other but exchanged no words. Hardy punched the down button and the elevator doors slid shut as the car headed back down.

He signed out, removed his credentials and gave them to the Marine guard stationed at the exit door, and exited the building for the last time. 

He had thought of every possible contingency. He had, over a year ago, purchased six valid United States passports in six different names and had booked multiple flights to Lima, Buenos Aires, London, Madrid, Paris, and Toronto at about two-hour intervals starting at 10 AM. 

At each of these airports he had booked connections to Frankfurt or Rome, and then on to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. And each connection at each stop was booked under a different name on different airlines. He would arrive in Riyadh as either Paul Alan Ackerman, or Frank Aaron Rosensweig, depending on which connecting airport he had to use.  

The United States had no extradition treaty with Saudi Arabia, so Rosen felt safe that he could live out his life in various rich Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia. After all, he had two hundred million dollars of the Mexico City payoff safely deposited in several off shore accounts.  

A small travel bag awaited him in the trunk of a rental car parked at Dulles Airport’s daily garage number 2. In the bag were several changes of causal clothes, shaving gear, and several days of clean socks and underwear.  

An attaché case, also in the trunk, contained a file folder with the passports in individual closed interoffice envelopes. Two other file folders contained his account access passwords and numbers for the various off shore bank accounts he would live off of for the rest of his life. 

Two new PCDs registered to Ackerman or Rosensweig were still in their boxes in the case. He would dispose of one of them when he arrived in Riyadh, depending on which name he had to use to fly there.

He walked quickly up East Executive Avenue to the blocked off Pennsylvania avenue intersection. He turned right down Pennsylvania and then turned right onto 15th Street. He passed G Street and then crossed over 15th. He walked down the block to the Old Ebbitt Grill, entered through the revolving glass door and into the Victorian-era interior. 

He turned away from the host station and the large turn of the century bar and went down the steps to the toilets.  

Pushing open the door to the men’s room, he sat down his briefcase and opened the utility closet. He pulled out the “closed for cleaning” sign and placed it outside the men’s room door. Pulling a rubber doorstop from his brief case, he kicked it into place behind the door effectively blocking the door from anyone entering.  

He picked up the briefcase and sat it on a sink. Standing at the adjacent sink, he opened the case, and began applying his false goatee and spraying gray hair highlights into his dark brown hair. He had practiced this over and over, and had the entire process complete in less than two minutes. 

He pulled out the doorstop, threw it back in his brief case, and closed the case. Opening the door, he walked around the cleaning sign and back up the steps. 

Exiting the Grill, he retraced his steps to the 15th Street and New York Avenue intersection. Here, he haled a cab. He had planned to use this location, since it was a very busy tourist area and cabs were easy to come by most all times of the day.  

“Dulles Airport, please” Rosen said when he entered the cab. He settled back, and glanced out the window at his last view of the White House. He sighed, checked his watch for the time, and settled back in the seat. He pulled the flight schedules from his pocket and checked the time again. He would get to Dulles, get the attaché case from the car, and be through check-in and security screening just in time to catch the 12:50 Continental flight to Lima, Peru.

 



  

 

           

 

 

     

68

Back on The Chip’s Trail
Lt. James spoke, “While we wait for Adam, let’s start to try and figure out where to start after the chip. Or more to the point, where is Brad?”  

Kim said, “I’ve already tried Brad’s PCD. No response, it’s turned off. I just activated the tracker.” The tracker was a station function that would locate any of the senior staff via their PCD, even if the unit were turned off. This was a military add-on that NASA had thought was a good idea. If a disaster of some sort hit the station, the decision makers could be physically located quickly by simply entering their code to the tracker. 

The lieutenant replied, “Good. I’ve a bad feeling that he is in serious trouble.” 

Kim replied, “I’ve got a bad feeling that he is serious trouble.” 

Lt. James looked surprised and asked, “Why?”   

“If we can believe Senor De La Cruz, there are still two saboteurs onboard. They report to Dr. Rosen, the President’s Science Advisor, who has been bought by some important and obviously wealthy people in Mexico. The saboteurs must know Dr. Rosen pretty well. I don’t think he would recruit strangers into his plot. I would think that at least one, if not both, of these traitors are of a level of authority that having conversations with Dr. Rosen would not seem unusual. In fact, their conversations would probably be considered NASA business as usual. So they would be in the senior staff structure.” She paused to catch her breath and check the tracker.

Kim continued, “And then, the bloody shoe prints of Rafael’s killer would indicate the person had been at the crystal lab crash site and got his shoes all cut up. Other than us, everyone there initially was senior staff. Since the techs showed up much later at the site, they would have been busy in their cleanup when Rafael was murdered.”

The Lieutenant nodded, “Go on”.

“Let’s assume that Rafael was attempting to write the initial of his killer. The bloody B would narrow it to one of three people at the crash site. They are Brad Bolino, Greg Ballard, and Layne Bartlett,” Kim ticked off on her fingers.

The lieutenant nodded again, “And now, Brad Bolino is missing, and he has the chip.”

“Yes, but he’s not missing now!” Kim expressed jubilantly as she pointed at the tracker screen. “The tracker says his PCD is moving, and is headed toward the evacuation staging area at the hub. He appears to be using the elevator.”

“Let’s go!” Lt James said as he leapt toward the door. 

At that moment the lieutenant’s cell rang. It was Adam Sand. “James, we’re in deep crap. The missile is already on its way. I’m trying to get the President to abort it now that he knows there are still people on the station with not enough time left to evacuate. It would certainly help if we could say we have regained station control!”

“Adam, we believe Bolino is in on this plot and has the chip. He probably killed Rafael. He’s headed to the evacuation point. We’re going after him. Give us three or four minutes to recover the chip.”

Adam replied, “Lieutenant, I’ll give you all of the time you want. There is no way we can get everyone off the station before the missile gets here. So we either convince the ground to abort the missile or we all die. It’s that simple. We have about twenty minutes left.”

“Okay, I understand. We’ll let you know as soon as we have the chip. Goodbye.” The lieutenant hung up, quickly explained the situation to Kim, whose eyes widened as their perilous position struck home.  

They ran out the door to their security cart. In back were two PPUs, the personal propulsion devices. As they began to strap on the units, Kim placed a hand on top of the lieutenant’s hand holding his PPU. She looked at him in the eye and said, “I’ll go get Bolino. I need you to chase down the connection between Dr. Rosen and Bolino. Maybe that’ll tell us who the other traitor is, too.” 

Lt. James balked and shook his head, “No, I’m going with you.”

Kim could tell by the look on his face that he was determined to go after Bolino. She simply said, “Lieutenant, I was given command of this investigation and I order you to do as I say. This is not open to a democratic vote on your part. Now go and do as I ordered.”   

The lieutenant stared at her and fought his emotions. “Officer Danby -- Kim, I can’t believe this is in the best interest of our personal safety. We’re pretty sure that Bolino has Hoch’s weapon. What makes you think he’ll not try to use it? He’s already killed once!” 

Kim in an emphatic voice replied, “Please, no argument. Just go and do as I ordered. I’m a trained law enforcement agent just as you are. I can apprehend this guy solo. Now just go get your assignment done, okay?” 

The lieutenant hesitated for a split second and then laid down the PPU he was still holding. He nodded his head saying, “Be careful and don’t take chances. Our goal is the recovery of the chip. The taking of Bolino is secondary. If need be, just shoot him and don’t try to take him prisoner. He’s far too dangerous!” He turned and getting in the cart headed for the security office to run down Dr. Rosen and Brad Bolino’s pasts.

         

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

69

White House Situation Room
Dr. Rosen had left the President no more than a minute ago. The President’s Chief of Staff, Alan Hardy, had just arrived in the underground facility and had stumbled on Rose’s unconscious body sprawled in the hallway to the Situation Room. His yell had caught the President’s attention. He turned and saw Rose lying on the floor. Her face was turned toward him and he saw the tiny trickle of blood still issuing from her nose.  

The President jumped up and ran to the door, “Alan, what the hell is going on? Did you do this?” 

Hardy replied, “Hell no, I found her lying here. I wonder how long she has been here?” 

“Not too long, Dr. Rosen just left and would have seen her,” the President stated.

“Oh yeah, I saw him getting off the elevator as I got on to come down. So, she couldn’t have been her for more than a few seconds,” Hardy suggested. 

The President nodded and stated, “I thought she had left already. I asked for her resignation, and Dr. Rosen brought it to me. He said she had gone.”  

Hardy yelled loudly for help and immediately a door opened and two Marines and two Secret Service agents ran out of a room adjacent to the Situation Room. Hardy ordered, “Get this woman some medical assistance. And stay with her until they get here.”  

Hardy, inspecting the hallway, considered his leader’s remarks and replied, “Something isn’t right here. Look at the blood drops down the hall. They come out of the advisors’ office. So Rose must have come out of there and made her way toward you. If this had happened in the hall, Rose could have yelled for help just like I did and these men would have responded just like they just did.”  

Hardy walked down the hall, turned on the overhead lights, and looked into the advisors’ office. The drops of blood from Rose’s nose led to a small pool of blood under the far desk. Hardy said, “It looks like she was attacked and stuffed under that desk. What the hell is going on?” 

The President looking through the door and inspecting the scene said, “I don’t know but I intended to find out!” 

He turned to the shorter of the Secret Service agents. “Rocky, find out what the hell happened here!”     

“Yes, sir, we’ll get to the bottom of it.” 

The President strode back to the Situation room with Hardy in tow. 

The lead agent looked at the room, the trail of blood and the unconscious woman so close to the Situation Room. He sighed and thought, Oh great! Why did this happen on my shift? Crap, crap, crap. Okay Rocky get a grip and deal with it. It’s just the President’s National Security Advisor lying on the floor looking like she was hit by a freight train. No big deal. Crap! No big deal! Who am I kidding? Let’s just hope the media doesn’t get wind of this.

The Marines had returned with the President’s doctor. As he arrived, “Rocky”, the agent, grabbed his arm and requested, “Doc, if possible, wake her up so we can find out what happened here.” 

He dropped to his knees and began checking the woman’s vital signs, looked into her bleeding nose, and felt around her head. He seemed pleased with his findings, and reaching in his bag brought out an ammonia nitrate ampoule. As he broke it and stuck it under Rose’s nose, he said to the two agents, “She’s okay, somebody really walloped her in the back of the head. She probably has a minor concussion, and should go to the hospital for observation.   

Rose’s head snapped away from the pungent odor under her nose. Her eyes fluttered open and moved around until they focused on the doctor. He smiled at her and said, “It’s okay. You were hit very hard on the head and you must have staggered out here and fainted.” 

She shook her head, “No, I was trying to get to the Situation Room to tell the President that the evacuation order for Storm Killer had not been received. There are still people on the station and he’s got to abort the missile!” 

None of the people in attendance had a clue what she was talking about. When a crisis was underway and the Situation Room was in use, no external media coverage or personal communications could be received by anyone other than the President and his senior advisors. This was to ensure the junior staff did not panic or spread rumors about any situation taking place above ground.

Rose glanced around at the men looking down at her. She recognized the two Secret Service agents. The shorter one was a man nicknamed “Rocky” because he had a vague resemblance to Sylvester Stallone.  

She pointed to him and said, “You’re the agent they call Rocky, right?” 

He nodded and replied. “Yes ma’am. And I believe you’re Rose Magruder, the President’s Security Advisor?”   

Rose decided it was best to not reply to that. Things were difficult enough without trying to explain about her resignation. She just nodded her head in reply. 

“Agent Rocky, I need to see the President at once! If he doesn’t stop something he started, his Presidency and the prestige of the United States may suffer badly. Can you help me walk into him?” Rose pleaded. 

“Just a moment, ma’am. I need to know what happened here. Who hit you? And why?” Rocky asked. 

“Look, we haven’t any time for questions right now, I must see the President. I promise, as soon as I finish talking with him, I’ll answer anything you want answered. Please, get me in there right now!” Rose all but sobbed, her lips quivering. She was bordering on hysteria.

“Rocky” started to help her up and thought, Lady, you aren’t seeing anyone until I know what the hell happened here. And I’m sure not going to let a hysterical person anywhere near the President’s person. 

He nodded to his team member and they each took one of Rose’s arms. He looked to the Marines and said, “Guard the door to the Situation Room. No one gets in there unless I say so. Got it?” 

The Marines snapped to and stationed themselves at each side of the door with a click of their well-polished heels. 

“Ms. Magruder, please come with us,” Rocky ordered. Rose attempted to break away and Rocky added, “Don’t make me cuff you, ma’am.” 

Rose slumped and allowed them to walk her into the side room that the men had come out just a short time before. They closed the door behind them.

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

  

70

Just One More Hit
As soon as Lt. James had left to follow-up on, Kim fired the PPU and launched herself toward the core. She was moving vertically at about three meters per second and horizontally at about half that rate. She was pointed right at the evacuation point at the hub. 

As she flew, her PCD signaled an incoming fax had arrived. She saw it was from Antonio De La Cruz. He had faxed the phone records as he had promised. She had no time to look at them. She manipulated the keys on her PCD and resent the fax to Lt. James. She then dialed his number and he answered, “James here.”

“I just faxed you the phone records from our Mexican contact. Can you inspect them to see who Dr. Rosen may have called after his call from Mexico? Maybe he talked with his men up here.”

“Got it. The fax just came through. Kim, ah – be careful. Remember you and I have a standing agreement to get you clean from the drugs. No matter how long it takes. Okay?”

Her heart skipped a beat, “Yes, sir, I’ll be careful. I love you, too.” She hung up and mentally kicked herself. I love you. What the hell was that about? Did I really say that? Oh, God. It just came out. Jesus, I probably scared the poor guy away. What the hell is wrong with me? 

She flew in silence for another few seconds and then thought. I know what’s wrong. I’m stressed out. I’ll just take a small hit of my wonder drug. Not too much, just enough to get by. Just enough to take the nerves away but leave me sharp. 

She reached in her pants pocket and found the small black leather bag. Since the PPU was on automatic, both her hands were free. She quickly loaded a syringe with about three quarters of a normal dose and did the injection into the vein inside her elbow. 

She felt the warm rush of the drug as it raced through her bloodstream. She waited for the wonderful feeling of euphoria she always got from a dose. And, yes -- there it was! That heady feeling she needed right now. It was glorious.

 



  

                 

 

 

 

 

71

Tag – You’re It
Lt. James felt giddy and mulled over what had just been said on his call from Kim. She had said she loved him. Did she mean it? Why would she say it now? He was elated; he had loved her at first sight. He ached for wanting to take her in his arms and just cover her in kisses. But enough of that, if I don’t find these guys, Kim and I won’t live another hour.   

He looked at the fax content. Immediately after Dr. Rosen had received his call from the Mexican plotters, he had made a call to Greg Ballard! So Ballard was in on this, too! 

He set aside the fax. So how were Greg Ballard and Dr. Rosen connected? He pulled up the NASA personnel file for Rosen in one window and Greg Ballard’s in another window. He compared specific details of each suspect’s background.

Rosen was twelve years older than Ballard. So, they probably weren’t friends in their youth, the lieutenant opinioned to himself. 

Rosen was born in upstate New York while Ballard was born in Mississippi. Received his BA and MBA in Computer Science from SUNYIT. Ballard went to Mississippi State for his BA in chemistry. He held two other degrees from Mississippi State. He had a Masters in Engineering in Polymer and Fiber Science from Clemson. Both were members of their alumni associations.    

There was nothing in common there.     

Neither suspect had been in the military. 

Ballard had worked for an aerospace company at Area 51 following his MBA, and then came to work for CORDEX at Adam Sand’s request when the Storm Killer project was proposed and approved.

Rosen had never worked in the private sector. He had chaired the physics department at Clemson.

Clemson! Hadn’t Ballard done something at Clemson? 

The lieutenant’s heart was pounding faster as he read the rest of the two men’s academic history. Rosen had been the chair of the department at the time Ballard had attended. Ballard had served on four projects Clemson had performed for the military. Rosen had lead three of those projects. There’s the tie-in! They knew each other at Clemson! 

Rosen had provided consulting services on at least five projects Ballard had run at Area 51. These two were really tight.    

The lieutenant knew he was on the right track. He decided to run a system search of the Storm Killer senior staff’s personnel records for any academic entries about Clemson University. He started the search and was happy to see that only two other people had any ties to Clemson. 

Reviewing their personnel files, the lieutenant made the following notes:

They were childhood friends,

Brad Bolino and Layne Bartlett had attended college together,

They got their doctorates at Clemson at the same time, and

Dr. Rosen was the chair of the department when they attended there.

He pulled up the PCD call records from the Storm Killer internal exchange computer. 

Running a search of calls made from Ballard’s phone immediately after Rosen’s call to Ballard, he found what he was looking for. A call from Ballard to Bolino only thirty seconds after the call with Rosen had ended. Gotcha! Ballard had obviously called Bolino to pass on instructions from Rosen. There was now enough evidence to arrest them both. 

The lieutenant went back to the call record supplied by Antonio De La Cruz. Maybe there were more calls by Rosen that should be looked into. Another call caught his eye. Exactly one minute after completing his call with Ballard, Dr. Rosen had called another very familiar number – Kim Danby’s number! 

What the hell is going on? Kim can’t possibly be a part of this plot, or could she?  



 

 

 

 

 

 

72

The Chase
Adam completed his call with Lt. James. He looked at his watch and calculated they had about nineteen minutes left. Until the chip was found there was nothing to be done. Adam felt useless. Maybe I could help them catch Bolino? I’m useless sitting here. 

He picked up his PPU and put it on. He walked out of the door and looked up at the core. He picked out the evacuation hub and fired his ascension jets. He liked manual control and loved the feeling of actually flying the PPU. He also turned off the limit controls and raised the speed of ascent to thirty meters a second. At this rate he would be at the hub in less than two minutes.    

He didn’t have a weapon; he would have to be very careful. He wasn’t even sure what good he could do, but he had to do something. Bolino holds the key to our survival – the chip. The chip had to be recovered at all costs. 

He pulled his communications device from his belt and punched Rose Magruder’s number. It rang several times and was answered by a male voice Adam did not recognize. 

“Hello?” 

Adam hesitated, “Ah, hello. Is Rose available?”

“Not at the moment. Who’s calling?”

“Adam Sand.”

“Can I take a message?”

“Ah, I need to talk to her about aborting the missile.” 

“What missile?”

“The Russian missile!” Adam replied in an exacerbated voice. “Don’t you realize we only have minutes to live unless the President aborts the missile? Please, I must speak with Rose Magruder, she should have reached the President by now and let him know there are still crew aboard the station.”

“What station?” the voice asked.

“Storm Killer! Jesus Christ, doesn’t anyone down there know what is going on? Where’s Rose?” Adam yelled into his phone.

“Ms. Magruder has been detained by the Secret Service. I am the lead agent on the investigation,” the voice declared. 

“Investigation? An investigation of what? Rose is a victim of Dr. Rosen’s betrayals! He hit her, and then lied to the President. Rose was supposed to get to the President and tell him all of this. Did something else happen to her?” Adam explained.   

“No, we found her unconscious just a few feet from the Situation Room. She had apparently been hit on the head and passed out before she could reach the President. She became hysterical when we detained her to figure out what happened,” the detached voice explained. 

She hadn’t seen the President! The missile was still live and about to deliver its deadly payload. 

Adam resisted yelling again, “Look, Rose is hysterical because lives hang in the balance. If she doesn’t tell the President about us still being on the station, when the missile arrives and blows us up, the President will have our blood on his hands. He thinks we have already evacuated the station! I can try to call the Situation Room myself, but it will not be as effective as her briefing the President. He is going to be super-pissed when he finds out we were lied to about evacuation by Dr. Rosen.”

“I’ll take it under consideration,” the voice replied.

“Consideration? Consider this! Dr. Rosen is the bad guy here. He attacked Rose, and he lied to the President and to us on the station. He is the one you should be interrogating!” 

“Is that all?” the voice questioned.

“Yes. Please rush her to the President’s side so she can explain the current situation. Please!” 

“We will be in touch. Goodbye,” the voice declared.

Adam attempted to dial the Situation Room and was told the President was in conference. The switchboard only offered to take Adam’s name and his message was brief. The message was: Storm Killer not evacuated. Abort missile. See Rose Magruder in Secret Service detention for explanation.    

Occupied with flying the PPU and his phone calls, Adam didn’t look around to see where the other players were. If he had, he would have seen Kim in her PPU in a slower ascent about five hundred meters below him. He would also have seen Brad Bolino on the elevator about one hundred meters from the hub terminus. Adam was actually going to arrive at the hub before any of the other players in the upcoming drama. 

Adam was rapidly approaching the hub terminus. As he maneuvered for landing, he spotted Brad just twenty meters from below him. Brad had not yet seen him as his back was to Adam. 

Adam landed with a jarring thud from too much forward speed. He grabbed the ladder rungs leading to the slowly turning central shaft leading to the reception room to steady him in the zero-G environment. He shucked the PPU and let it drift away. He moved hand over hand to the static central tunnel used to access the hub airlocks. The evacuation point was fifteen meters behind him in the reception room adjacent to the airlock. He could see racks of EVA suits awaiting their owners who would never come to claim them. There were moving shadows playing over the suits. It must be the one of the evacuation team. Another dead body if we can’t stop Bolino!  Adam thought. 

He stood with his back to the exit shaft leading to the reception room and looked both left and right. The floor gracefully curved upward and eventually met at the top. Each of the other quadrants’ elevators terminated at ninety-degree separations around this curved floor. Each of the other elevator terminuses had a similar ladder arrangement to the exit shaft. The three-rung ladder was spread over four meters of height, but with zero-G it was easy to navigate. 

Bolino arrived at the terminus and glided off the t-bar elevator to the closest handhold overlooking the vast interior of Storm Killer. He quickly scanned the empty space between the terminus and the surface of the station’s interior. He suddenly froze as if indecisive. 

Sands thought, He must’ve spotted Kim making her way to his position, because he seems to be startled.

Bolino abruptly turned to the exit shaft, and then stopped when he saw Adam blocking his path.  

“Sands! What the hell are you doing here?” Bolino said in surprise. Even as he was speaking he was slowly moving his hand toward the plainly visible gun stuffed in his belt.  

Adam responded, “Don’t go for the gun, Brad. You can’t get away with it. Not another murder. The security team is right behind you waiting to arrest you for Rafael’s killing.” 

Bolino couldn’t see if Adam was armed. At least his hands were empty. No apparent weapon. Maybe I can take him out. 

Adam sensed what Brad was thinking and added, “Don’t even think about it. Kim Danby is right behind you and will not hesitate to shoot if you don’t surrender. So just toss the gun over to me.” 

Bolino was torn about what to do. If Danby was behind him, he was dead. If she wasn’t, Sand was doing a masterful job of bluffing. His hand rested on the butt of Hoch’s gun. 

Maybe he could bargain for his freedom, Bolino reasoned. Maybe Sand doesn’t know about the missile and the imminent destruction of his creation. 

“Kim, if you are back there, don’t move or Adam dies.” Bolino challenged as he drew the gun from his belt. 

Damn, he isn’t buying it! At least, not buying it enough to disarm. I wish Kim really were here! Adam’s thoughts whirled through his mind. Time seemed to be dragging slowly second to second. She should be arriving soon. Can I keep Bolino busy until then?

Bolino began speaking, “Adam, look, I don’t want to hurt you. In fact, I want to save you. There is a nuclear-armed missile being launched at us. We have to evacuate, now! You and I can save our hides. We can still make it to the waiting shuttle. They won’t begin backing away to a safe distance for a while yet. But we have to go right now! So, come on, buddy, let’s you and I haul ass out of here! Okay?”

“I know all about the missile. In fact, my man, you are using the wrong tense on your verb. It has already been launched,” Adam replied. He could see the look of astonishment on Bolino’s face. “What? Didn’t any of your fellow plotters tell you? Well, I guess you’re considered expendable, too. Just like the rest of us, uh, ‘buddy’?”   

Bolino was dumbstruck, his eyes widening into saucers, “They launched already? We got to get out of here, now!”  

Adam could only stand and shake his head. “No, we aren’t going anywhere.”  

The voice of Greg Ballard spoke from behind Adam, “I’m afraid we are going somewhere, Adam.” 

Adam felt a pressure in his back as Greg said, “Come on, Brad, I’ve got Adam covered. Here’s a roll of duct tape, tape up his hands and feet. Then let’s get out of here!” 



 

 

 

 

 

 

73

Dulles Airport
Dr. Rosen, now traveling as Paul Eastman, had checked into Continental, passed through security using his forged passport, and was sitting in the terminal awaiting to board to the 50-seat Embraer RJ145 jet. It would fly him to Houston where he would connect to a Boeing 757 for the flight to Lima. 

Once in Lima, he would exit the airport and spend the night at the Hotel Manhattan adjacent to the airport, as Paul Eastman. Then re-enter the airport and fly to London the next morning at 6 AM as Paul Alan Ackerman. While at the hotel, he would dye his hair and put in the tinted contacts to match his Ackerman image and description on the forged German passport.    

In London, he would connect to Qatar Airways at 9:30 at night for his flight to Riyadh. 

Paul Alan Ackerman, a retired stockbroker from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, would arrive to begin his new life.

As Dr. Rosen, who had done a great many favors over the years for the Saudi royal family in their attempts at gathering military intelligence on new United States armaments, it had been a relatively simple matter to obtain a residence permit for Mr. Ackerman. That relationship plus a guarantee of fifty million dollars upon arrival to the King’s cousin, who runs the Saudi immigration office, had swung the deal for the permit.    

Dr. Rosen had carefully and thoroughly planned his escape. He may be tracked, but it would prove very difficult for the trackers.  

His flight was called and boarding went quickly. He stowed his attaché case and his small duffel bag in the overhead and buckled himself in. The plane had a one-seat configuration on the left side of the cabin and a two-seat configuration on the right side. He had chosen a single seat in the third row when he booked the flight. He would at least be left alone and unobserved for this part of the trip.

A very unattractive female flight attendant gave the standard airline safety briefing. Most passengers were businessmen who had heard the same safety spiel at least twice a week. They completely ignored the woman and kept their heads buried in their business journals, travel ledgers, and skin magazines.    

The plane pushed back from the gate, fired up the twin turbines, and taxied into a short queue of planes awaiting takeoff. After what seemed an eternity to Dr. Rosen, the plane was cleared onto the active runway, spun up the engines, and took off.  

He smiled as he reclined his seat, closed his eyes, and considered his future life with one hundred and fifty million dollars to spend. 



 

 

 

 

 

 

74

Rose Briefs The President
The President had Mt. Wilson Observatory on the squawk box in the center of the conference table. He sat waiting for them to announce they had seen the demolition of Storm Killer by the Russian missile. 

His Chief of Staff noticed Rocky, the Secret Service agent, waving to get his attention from the hallway. “Excuse me, Mr. President, but I’m being beckoned by Rocky. He apparently wants to pass on something to us.”  

He started walking to the door when the President responded, “Have him come in. I want to hear what he has to say. There is something rotten in Denmark and I want to know what it is.” 

Hardy waved for Rocky to enter. 

He entered and stood looking at the President. Rocky, looking somewhat sheepish, announced, “Sir, I think it would be wise for you to speak with Ms. Magruder.”

“Why,” the President inquired. 

“Well, sir, it appears that she was on her way to brief you on a situation aboard that Storm Killer station. Something about the crew not evacuating the station. You really should…. ”  

The President cut him off, “What? The crew is still onboard? Get her ass in here, now!”

Rocky hurriedly exited the room. 

Hardy looked at the President with questioning gaze and the President said, “I thought they were all off the station. How the hell can I destroy the thing with crew still aboard? Christ, this situation just gets worse and worse.” He rested his head in his hands and rubbed his forehead with his fingers.    

Rocky arrived supporting Rose by her arm. She was almost out on her feet. She looked at the closest chair and the President waved her to sit down. 

“Okay, Rose, what the hell is this all about?” the President demanded.

“Sir, the crew never got off the station. They are still there. They’ll die if the missile continues. You’ve got to abort it.” 

“How, Rose? I thought you personally contacted Adam Sand and told him to evacuate,” the President said. 

“I did, sir. But Dr. Rosen hit me over the head and called Adam back and told him the launch had been postponed.” 

“My god, are you sure? Dr. Rosen did that?” Hardy asked incredulously. 

“Yes. When I came to, my phone was ringing. It was Adam. He told me what Dr. Rosen had done. I tried to get to this room, but I was so woozy I fell and blacked out again. Dr. Rosen saw me trying to get here and must have seen me pass out again. He was sitting right where you are,” she said, pointing to where Hardy sat.  

Hardy saw that she was right. From that seat, there was a perfect, unobstructed view of the hall. He nodded in agreement. 

Hardy looked at the President, “You have to abort. You can’t have the crew’s blood on your hands. The voters would demand your head on a platter.” 

The President shook his head. “What choice do I have? If we don’t destroy the damned thing, there will be a reign of destruction all over the Earth. I have to weigh the lives of the crew against the lives of possibly millions down here.”

Hardy had been reading the weather updates on Hurricane Edna when Rose was brought in. He countered, “Sir, Storm Killer may be our only chance of lowering the amount of destruction coming with Edna. If they can get control back, we can apply it to the purpose it was built for. We can attempt to weaken Edna back to a manageable storm. Not this monster we now have!”

The President was at a crossroads. He had wanted this job, and now he had it. No one else could make this decision. He felt boxed in with nowhere to turn. Like a cornered animal, he could just lash out, or he could try to rationally deal with the problem. Which would it be? He thought as he stared at the tabletop. 

He eventually raised his head and announced, “I’ve reached a decision.” 

 

      



   

       

  

 

 

 

75

The Hares And The Hounds
Kim reached the height of the hub terminus. She was approaching as fast as she could. She had seen Bolino reach the terminus and get off the elevator. She had seen him looking down at her from the hub terminus. She saw him suddenly turn as if surprised by someone behind him. 

He’s armed and dangerous. I’d better slip around to the opposite elevator and work my around from above, Kim planned on the spur of the moment.

She slowly flew her PPU to the furthest elevator, tied the unit off. She balanced on a narrow ledge outside of the terminus structure and poked her head around the elevator shaft opening. Nothing. No one was in the terminus area. Bolino must have entered the shaft to the reception room.    

She pushed herself away from the elevator and grabbed the top rung of the ladder. She stopped her forward motion and slowly peeked her head up to see down the shaft. 

Kim saw Adam Sand hog-tied with duct tape floating in mid-air. Brad had his back to Kim as he put on his EVA suit. 

Kim was still on a euphoric high from the shot of cocaine she given herself on the way to the hub. She felt invincible! Kim didn’t hesitate; she drew her weapon and launched herself down the shaft. Pulling her body down the shaft, she used the handholds found at locations corresponding to each of the four quadrants of the elevator terminuses. 

She used her feet to grapple the last set of handholds. She stopped with her head and shoulders inside the reception room and the rest of her body remaining inside the shaft.   

She took aim at Bolino’s back and triumphantly yelled at him to freeze, when a heavy weight descended from above and slammed into her, knocking the breath out of her.

She was startled by the assault and lost her grip on her gun. She saw it slowly floating end over end back down the access shaft. She was weaponless with two adversaries! Why had she let the drug-induced feeling of invincibility overrule her police training? Why had she come charging in like some pistol-toting cowboy, instead of the consummate professional she truly was? And, what was she going to do to overcome two desperate men?   



  

      

 

  

 

 

76

Lieutenant James
The lieutenant was stunned by the discovery that Dr. Rosen, the apparent mastermind of the plot to destroy Storm Killer, had phoned Kim. 

His mind was ablaze with conflicting thoughts and emotions. One thing was clear, she would have to be detained until this could all be sorted out. 

He paced back and forth trying to decide what to do. He slammed his fist into his open hand, grabbed his PPU, made his way outside, and took off in pursuit of the culprits. If Kim were in on it, he would detain her, if she was innocent, she might need help to deal with two perps. 

He turned off the limits control on the PPU and took of at full speed toward the hub evacuation point. 

He would get to the bottom of this and do it fast. The look on his face was grim as he accelerated toward the hub.  



 

 

 

 

 

 

77

Decision
The President looked between Rose and Hardy. They could tell by his body language and the grimace on his face how much pressure he was under at the moment. 

Rose held her breath. She had pled her case to abort the missile strike. She had done all she could. She had covered the moral implications of the missile strike. The knowing killing of the innocent crew was unacceptable. 

Hardy had sided with her. He had explained to the President the political ramifications of adding more murders to those that had already happened. 

The President spoke, “This office took responsibility for command and coordination of the Storm Killer project when this crisis started. This office failed miserably at notifying the crew to evacuate. Granted, all of the failures were due to successful plots to ensure the destruction of Storm Killer. Why that plot existed is still an open question. But we know Dr. Rosen lied several times, countermanded the evacuation order, physically assaulted Rose, and has now vanished.”

He looked at Rocky. “The FBI and Secret Service will find out what Rosen is all about.” Rocky nodded in reply. 

He continued, “Based on all of this, the plotters both here and apparently on Storm Killer want it destroyed. So doing what they want doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense. Therefore, I am going to order the missile strike aborted.” 

Rose let out the air she had been holding in her lungs for what seemed a lifetime. “Thank God, sir. That’s the right decision!”

The President keyed the phone line connected to his Russian counterpart. “Vladimir? Are you there?”

“Yes, Mr. President, I am here,” the Russian replied.

The President spoke, “I must order the missile strike be aborted. Certain information has come to light that changes everything. Please issue the abort order.”

“Are you sure, Mr. President? If we do this thing, we would not have time to launch another strike before your station goes completely rogue.” The Russian president responded.   

“Yes, dear friend, I know that. But it must be aborted. So, please, destroy your missile.”

“As you wish. Before I issue that order, I wish to make sure our agreement for certain concessions is not voided by your request to abort.” The Russian wanted his prizes.

“Yes, we will honor our agreement just as if the missile had detonated and destroyed the station.” The President’s face had a small, tired smile playing on its features. 

“Very well, I will issue the abort at once. And I think this concludes our involvement in your situation. Yes?” Vladimir asked.

“Yes, thank you. Goodbye.” 

“Goodbye and good luck,” the Russian ended. 

The President turned to Rose and said, “Rose, there’s three things I need you to do.”

He reached for the top piece of paper on the pile next to his hand. “I want you to tear up this letter of resignation. I do believe that Dr. Rosen will more than suffice as the scapegoat for this whole thing. And why would I want to fire someone as competent as you are?” He handed her the letter. She smiled at him.

“The second thing I want you to do is contact Adam Sand and tell him about the missile abort, and get an update on where they stand on getting control back. Tell him to go through Hardy for any further communications. And then I want you to do one more thing. Allow this Marine,” The President pointed to the uniformed man at the door, “to take you to the hospital for a checkup.”  

“Yes, sir!” 

“All right, everyone, this crisis is far from over, so let’s all get to work!” the President ordered.   



  

             

 

 

 

 

78

The Capture
Lt. James glided into the elevator terminus at the hub. He saw Kim’s PPU tied to the side of the terminus and he observed another PPU floating nearby. Who did that belong to? 

Drawing his gun, he cautiously entered the terminus. He could hear voices coming from the reception room just beyond the access shaft. He moved to the last rung of the ladder leading to the access shaft, stuck his head over the edge so he could see and hear down the shaft, and listened. He could hear at least two men and woman arguing. The arguing was almost drowned out by a personal communicator ringing. 

He heard Bolino’s voice, “Greg, let’s just shoot her and go! That missile will be here soon!”

The other male voice was Greg Ballard’s, “No! Hell, I never wanted anyone dead. This whole thing has gotten way out of hand. Get the duct tape. We’ll just tie her up and let the missile do the dirty work.”

He heard Kim’s voice, “You guys aren’t going to get away with this. We’re on to you. There’s plenty of evidence against you.” 

Greg responded, “Yeah, there’s plenty of evidence but it’s almost all here on the station. So when the station’s destroyed, so will the evidence, and so will you.”

Bolino said, “Here’s the tape, I’ll hold the gun on her while you tape her. You can check Sand’s tape too while you’re at it.” 

The lieutenant inhaled a breath and muttered, “Sand was in there, too, and was taped up? I guess I had best act.” 

He heard sounds of what seemed to be a struggle and shouts from Bolino and Ballard. 

“Get her!” Smack!

“Watch out!” Thud.

And then there was a scream of anguish and Greg’s voice ordering, “Kim, stop! Back up into the corner! Do it, or I’ll shoot you.”

He made his way down the shaft and peeked into the reception room. Kim was backed into the far corner facing Greg who held the edge of the desk with one had and covered her with Hoch’s gun with the other. 

Bolino floated aimlessly around the room with what appeared to be a broken arm and a large welt over his right eye. He was out cold.   

Kim seemed ready to launch herself at Ballard. She seemed almost like a cornered animal. Her eyes were slightly glazed over, her breath came in heaves, and her face had a somewhat crazed look. She moved her fingers almost like claws. 

It suddenly dawned on Lt. James. Oh no, she’s high! She took more of that drug crap! What an idiotic thing to do. Get high while about to make arrests of very dangerous people. She’s gone stupid on me. 

The lieutenant made a quick decision. This has to end now!

Adam Sand had yelled at Ballard to leave Kim alone. He had turned slightly to look at Sand. The lieutenant saw that this had gotten Ballard’s attention away from Kim. She made ready to launch herself at him.

Lt. James gathered himself up and launched himself at Ballard’s back. They collided with considerable force, knocking the breath out of both of them. The gun in Ballard’s hand fired. 

Fighting in freefall was not easy. There was nowhere to get leverage on an opponent. The lieutenant wrapped one arm around Ballard’s neck and applied pressure. He pressed his gun against Ballard’s temple with the other hand. “Enough, Greg, it’s over. Toss the gun away.”

He could feel Ballard tense up struggling to find some way out of the headlock. He applied more pressure to   Ballard’s neck and quietly said, “Stop, now. It’s over.”

He felt Ballard go limp and saw the gun float away. Almost at the same moment, the personal communicator ringing stopped. 

He looked over at Kim to ask her to get the gun and saw the shot Ballard had pulled off had hit her. The blood was bubbling from the wound in her right shoulder. A bleeding wound in free fall was very different than in gravity. The blood bubbles out of the wound and forms little balls of blood that float around.  

She was staring at her wound with a look of surprise and helplessness.   

The lieutenant became infuriated. He saw Ballard through a red haze. He applied all the pressure he could to Ballard’s neck. He wanted to kill him. He would kill him. Ballard realized his precarious position and attempted to pull free.

Ballard’s wind had been cut off. He struggled for short time and then went limp. All of the time this struggle had been playing out, Kim had been observing in detached, almost dream-like, view of what was happening.    

She snapped back to reality as she saw Greg Ballard’s face go from vivid red, to scarlet, to a shade of blue. He was being strangled. No, I can’t let this good man commit murder!

“Stop! Stop! Please don’t kill him. He’s not worth it,” she yelled at the lieutenant. She pushed away from the wall, and leaving a trail of blood balls in the air, grabbed the lieutenant by the arm around Ballard’s neck and started pulling on it. “Stop, please.”

Ballard was limp. The lieutenant slowly emerged from the red haze of ultimate anger and regained his senses. Kim was pulling on the arm he’d wrapped around Ballard’s neck, yelling for him to stop. 

He released Ballard, who drifted away, unconscious, but still alive. His face was already returning to a shade of red from the pasty blue color it had been previously. 

Lt. James pulled Kim to him. He reached for his handkerchief and placed it over Kim’s wound to staunch the bleeding. Free floating red blobs of Kim’s blood splashed onto their faces and bodies.  

They held each other for what seemed like forever. The lieutenant eventually held her out at arms length and said, “You took more coke, didn’t you?” 

She nodded her head but didn’t say anything. 

“I told you before that if I thought that crap was interfering with the investigation, I would take over, didn’t I?” he asked her.

Again, she just nodded. 

“Now is the time. You were very stupid taking that crap and then trying to catch these guys.”

She just nodded again.

“Okay, so that’s done. Now let’s find that chip and truss these guys up and then get you some medical attention.”

For the first time, she spoke, “Don’t worry about my wound. It’s almost stopped bleeding. We have to get the chip back to the control center!”   

Adam Sand interrupted, “Sorry, guys, but would you mind untying me before you run off? 

Kim and the lieutenant both laughed. Kim began pulling the tape from Adam’s wrists, and Lt. James began taping Ballard’s wrists and ankles and then did the same to Bolino.

Adam asked Kim, “Where did you learn to hand fight like that? When you took out Bolino, it was almost like a zero-G jujitsu.”

Kim answered, “Hoch had come up with some unique ways of hand fighting in zero-G. He taught me and we practiced several times a week during the early days here on the station. I have Hoch to thank for still being alive.”     

Adam unbound his own feet while Kim felt through Bolino’s pockets looking for the chip. Her heart skipped a beat when she felt its form inside his shirt pocket. She pulled it out and held it up to Sand and James. “We have it!”

Adam said, “Get going, I’ll finish trussing up these guys and stand guard until you get back.” 

Kim replied, “Okay, we’re off to return the chip. You should also check your phone to see who was so persistent at trying to call you a minute ago!”

He nodded and pulled up the PCD phone. He read the caller id, “Its Rose Magruder! I hope she has good news for us! I’ll let you know.” He started dialing her back as Kim and the lieutenant headed down the shaft to retrieve their PPUs and head to the control center.    

    



 

 

 

 

 

 

79

White House
Rose was ecstatic, she had her job back and based on the President’s remarks, was more entrenched in halls of power now than she had been before. Now, to get through this crisis with minimum damage both materially and politically. 

She retrieved her phone from Agent Rocky and selected Adam Sand’s number. After thirty or more rings, she hung up.

Something was wrong. Why wasn’t Adam answering? Where was he? Should I tell the President I can’t raise him?

She fretted over what to do. She decided to call Kim Danby, the security office in charge of the investigation and see if she knew where Adam was. She dialed Kim’s number and was concerned that it rolled over to the voice mail, indicating the phone was turned off. 

She tried Lt. James, the senior security officer onboard, and got the same voice mail response.

What’s going on up there? Adam doesn’t answer and the two main security people have their phones turned off. This isn’t good!

She began walking back to the Situation Room. Just as she reached the door to the room, her phone rang. She answered, “Rose Magruder.’

“Rose! It’s Adam Sand! Sorry I wasn’t able to take your call. I was tied up so to speak,” Adam announced.

“My God, Adam. Am I glad to hear your voice. I was really worried that something bad had happened to you.” 

“No, nothing bad. I have good news. We have the chip. It’s on its way back to the control center right now.”

“Oh, Adam, that’s wonderful! I have good news for you, too. The President aborted the missile strike.” 

Adam could be heard breathing a huge sigh of relief, “Great! I’ll let the staff know at once. Tell the President we should have full station control back within a few minutes. The only thing left to fix will be the film array deployment, so we can turn off the beam. But we’ll need the beam for a while I would think, right?”

“Yes, you are to resume the attempt to “kill” Edna. Or, at least weaken her before she hits Florida,” Rose replied.

“Okay, will do! I’ll contact you again after control is regained,” Adam said and disconnected the call.

Rose walked into the Situation Room and reported the good news to the President. Things were finally returning to normal.   

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

80

Kim Explains
As they rode the PPUs back to the command center, Lt. James thought about the events that had just transpired. From the conversation between Brad and Kim, the lieutenant got the distinct impression that Kim was not involved with Dr. Rosen’s plot. Statements he had heard Greg Ballard make as they had talked about tying up Kim reinforced this. And then the final straw was when Greg had shot Kim. 

Would he have shot a friend and co-conspirator? Maybe he was trying to tidy up loose ends, the lieutenant thought.  

Lt. James broached the subject that was still gnawing at him, “Kim, listen, I’ve got a couple of serious questions to pose to you. Please answer them truthfully, because you know I’ll eventually find out if your answers aren’t true.”  

Kim looked into his face and saw his features set in a determined, serious frown. 

Kim replied, “You know I could never lie to you. You saved my life. You’re my rock. I’d die before lying to you!”   

He took a deep breath and jumped in, “Okay, I believe you. I reviewed the call logs from Dr. Rosen. As we thought, they showed a clear connection to Greg and from Greg to Brad. The troubling part is that immediately after Dr. Rosen made the call to Greg, he called – you.” 

Kim snapped her head around sharply and said in a muddled tone, “Me? Right after he called Greg? I don’t understand.” The effects of the cocaine and the gunshot were taking a toll on her mental facilities and she wasn’t thinking clearly yet. 

“What did you two talk about? And why did you call Greg right after the call with Rosen?”

Kim tried to remember the conversation with Dr. Rosen. She had only talked to him once. When was it? What was said? 

It came back to her in a flash and she excitedly replied, “I talked to him once. It was when you were getting the chip out of Rafael. He called to tell me that the president had asked him to phone and offer all the resources of the government to be at my disposal for investigating and stopping the plot on Storm Killer. He asked me to pass on some similar words to Greg. I did.”

“That’s it?” the lieutenant asked.

Kim thought back and replied, “Yes. But now that I think about it, it was almost like he was reading a prepared script. I never gave that any thought until now. I’ll bet I was passing a coded message of some sort on to Greg and didn’t even know it.”

The lieutenant considered Kim’s words and finally said, “Okay, I believe you. I think Dr. Rosen was trying to throw a red herring into the investigation. If he got you implicated, the investigation might have bogged down until things could get sorted out. Thank God things developed so quickly. That phone call surfaced too late to do him any good as a delaying tactic.”

Kim relaxed. “I agree. Hell, I only talked to the man once. My phone records will bear that out. Since he was a senior advisor to the president, any of us would have willingly taken a call from him.” 

The lieutenant nodded saying, “Yes, we would have. Don’t sweat it. I’m sure we got it all cleared up. Now, let’s get this chip home and wrap up this whole thing!”

She nodded as they continued their PPU power drive to the control center.    

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

81

Tanechka
The launch specialist monitoring Tanechka’s progress picked up the ringing phone. It was a direct line from the Russian Missile Defense Command. 

“Ya?” 

“Corporal Korabek, listen carefully and write this down. Command code is AABB66MM33. Authorization is Delta Omega Tango Delta Tango. Abort code is 1100774455. Repeat 1100774455. Abort the mission.”  

“Abort? Are you crazy? We are on perfect flight path and all systems are functioning well. Why abort?” 

“This is not your decision. Abort the missile at once.”

“My Tanechka to be destroyed? She is beautiful and true. I’ll not destroy her!” 

“You will follow orders and destroy the missile. At once!”

The corporal was aghast. How could they destroy the beautiful Tanechka when she was performing her job so wonderfully?      

He hesitated for a moment and then remembered a phrase the Missile Security Force Commander had used at their initial briefing on arriving in the Missile Command. He had felt a shiver through his spine when he heard the commander say this phrase. 

The commander had said, “You will follow your orders to the letter and immediately. Any dereliction of duty will be considered treason, and both you and your family will be dealt with appropriately.” 

The gathered military personnel understood what the Commander meant. Both they and their families would be killed if they failed to do their duty. 

The corporal shuddered, entered the abort code he had received on his keyboard and pressed the abort button. He then responded to the last order. “Yes, sir. Abort performed.” 

Twenty thousand kilometers above the Earth and almost half way around it, Tanechka exploded from twenty-eight kilos of C-4 detonating in the warhead section. The warheads separated and began falling back to Earth. They made a marvelous fireworks display over Hawaii as they burned up re-entering the atmosphere. Four Hawaiian children saw the two shooting stars trailing over their island of paradise and laughed and pointed at the sight. Tanechka’s ending was as glorious as her short life.         

 



    

    

 

    

 

     

82

Recovery
Kim jumped from the cart before Lt. James had fully stopped it. She ran with the precious cargo in held tightly in her clinched fist. The computer chip was almost home!

As she entered the control center, she looked from side to side for Layne Bartlett. He wasn’t here! Nobody was in the room. Where was Bartlett? Where were the technicians? Kim was ready to scream in frustration when Layne came walking briskly through the door. He was placing his phone back into his belt loop holder.           

Kim quizzed him, “Where the hell are the technicians? Why is no one in here?” 

“I had them suit up and EVA to the Japanese shuttle. It’s still standing off the station waiting to pick up as many of us that can get away before the station is destroyed. The shuttle will back away to a safe distance in a few minutes. Where’s the chip?”

Kim handed him the chip she still had clutched so tightly in her fist. He held it up and inspected it. “It appears okay, but I have to run a set of diagnostics on it,” Layne said as he moved to a card table that had been set up near the sabotaged control computer.  

On the table was what looked like a PC with a silver box cabled to it. He took the chip and plugged it into what appeared to be a printed circuit board mounted to the top of the silver box. A red light on the box blinked off as an adjacent green light flashed on. He swiveled the PC toward him and began touching various keys on the keyboard.   

As Bartlett began his testing, Lt. James arrived. He had stopped to talk to Adam Sand on the phone. Adam had reported his conversation with the president’s advisor. The missile was being aborted! 

Sand asked Bartlett to call Rose Magruder when the chip was installed and activated.

The doctor had arrived at Lt. James’ request and bandaged and dressed Kim’s injured shoulder. The bullet had passed all the way through her shoulder. The Doctor said some reconstructive surgery would be required but the bleeding was stopped and the wound was not life threatening.   

The PC screen showed a progress bar as the diagnostics executed. Everyone in the room stared at the screen as the progress bar approached one hundred percent. 

The PC beeped, and a new screen popped up reading, “DIAGNOSTICS COMPLETE, NO ERRORS FOUND.” 

A collective sigh went up from the assembled group. Layne took the chip from its resting place on the silver box and placed it in its’ slot in the control computer. 

The group watched the monitor as it continued displaying new occurrences of the same error message indicating the guidance computer needed updated direction.

“REAL TIME REQUIRES PLAN DATA REFRESH … 5:10 MINUTES REMAINING”

He entered a few commands to the system to indicate the real time computer was now ready to accept new data from the computational computer, and that the computational computer should began feeding new real-time plan data to the control computer. 

They held their collective breath and waited for the system responses to Bartlett’s commands.  

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

83

Unhappy In Mexico
Senator Gutierrez received word the missile had been ordered aborted. He was livid. His plan was falling apart. He couldn’t reach Rosen. His intelligence said that Rosen had fled. 

Rosen had failed him.

He got another email on his screen from his Washington source. It indicated Rosen’s two associates on Storm Killer were in custody and that the chip had been recovered. 

The Senator was almost frothing at the mouth. Rosen! That ass has taken a great deal of our money and did not deliver. He would have to be dealt with.

The senator looked for some way to salvage some part of his plan and saw none. He had failed. But not all projects succeeded, better luck next time. 

With that, he opened his secret file cabinet within his desk, removed the Storm Killer file and placed each page into his shredder. When he finished, he picked up the phone and dialed a number he knew by heart. 

“Carlos? It’s the Senator. I have a job for you. Yes, one last job. Listen carefully.”   



 

 

 

 

 

 

84

Control
The assembled group still held their collective breath as they waited for the systems to respond to the commands that had been entered. 

The monitor continued to display the same error message over and over every five seconds: 


“REAL TIME REQUIRES PLAN DATA REFRESH … 5:00 MINUTES REMAINING

“REAL TIME REQUIRES PLAN DATA REFRESH … 4:55 MINUTES REMAINING
After what seemed an eternity but was only eight seconds, the monitor displayed a much wished for series of messages.

“REAL TIME READY FOR PLAN DATA.”

“PLAN DATA SESSION ESTABLISHED.”

“PLAN DATA TRANSMISSION RESUMED.”


“CONTROL SYSTEM REFRESHING REAL TIME   CACHE” 

“STATION BEING REPOSITIONED TO CURRENT PLAN DATA”
“OPERATIONS NORMAL”

Everyone began applauding at the same time; the station was now under control.  

Kim had not noticed that Lt. James had slipped his hand into hers as they had waited to see if station control would return. She did not try to pull her hand away, but instead gave his hand a slight squeeze. 

“We made it!” she said brightly to the lieutenant. 

He smiled and nodded, “Yes, we did. And now we can sort out how our prisoners and Rafael orchestrated this with Dr. Rosen. Let’s leave these scientist types to their fun and games with the hurricane while we wrap up our job.”  

Layne overheard their conversation. He stopped them as they started to walk out hand in hand. “Excuse me, but did I hear you use the name of Dr. Rosen?” he asked.

“Yes. We have reason to believe he’s behind this whole plot,” Kim answered.

“I knew him. He’s an egotistical ass. I never liked him, and I don’t think he like me very much,” Layne stated. 

“I think Brad thought the world of him. Rosen called Brad one of his best students. I think Greg was also one of Rosen’s teacher’s pets. You’ll have to ask him.” 

“Oh, don’t worry, Layne. We plan to ask him lots of questions!” Kim laughed. Then, the lieutenant joined her with a hearty baritone laugh. Layne just stared at them, not knowing that Greg and Brad were in custody for their roles in the Storm Killer plot. 

Kim put her arm around the small of the lieutenant’s back and he put his arm lightly around her shoulder avoiding putting pressure anywhere near her bullet wound. They looked at each other, laughed again and walked out of the control center. 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

85

Into The Frying Pan, Out Of The Fire
Storm Killer’s cone of heat was only three kilometers from the Lincoln. But even at that distance the effects of the tremendous heat were becoming apparent. The sea boiled and huge clouds of steam were rising even around the Lincoln. 

The four and a half acres of wood flight desk was starting to smoke. Soon, it would burst into flame as the heat continued to rise. 

The paint on the side of the ship nearest the heat had started to blister and slough off into the bubbling seawater.

The glass in the bridge windows closest to the heat ray cracked from the tremendous and instantaneous temperature differential. 

The crew in the refrigerated coolers were already experiencing temperatures approaching one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Even this far down in the ship in these chilled storage rooms, the temperature would soon rise to over a thousand degrees or higher as the actual heat ray swept over the ship. 

All care had been taken to remove the chance of an accidental explosion caused by volatile materials normally carried by an aircraft carrier.

All of the Lincoln aircraft had been drained of fuel to avoid any chance of an explosion. 

The aviation fuel stores would boil, but experts had told the Admiral that the fuel would not ignite. They did recommend the Lincoln’s crew add some additional external venting to the fuel tanks to allow gas fumes to evaporate to reduce the possibility of any possible fire source. As such, two large pipes had been added the tank vents that ran up the conning tower all the way to the radar antenna base and then right angled away from the ship for eight meters. Any fuel would burn away from these pipes even if a fire started. 

The aircraft and ship’s ordinance normally stored in the forward and rear magazines had been jettisoned overboard and were probably already lying on the bottom of the sea some two miles down. 

The Lincoln operated on nuclear power generation. The reactor was scrammed ten minutes before the last officer had left the bridge. Scramming the reactor partially shuts down the reactor while leaving it ready to quickly restart. This restart capability is extremely important in a warship. If they survived, or more likely when a recovery crew arrived after their deaths, the reactor could be restarted and the ship taken back to Hampton Roads under its own power. 

The Admiral sat on a sack of potatoes and wondered if he would look like some kind of roast beef dinner with roasted potatoes after the heat ray passed over. Stress brings out some macabre ideas. It’s almost over. I think it will be quick. At least I hope it will be.

If the Admiral had been on deck at that moment, he would have seen a welcome sight. The cone of heat suddenly began racing back to the east. Storm Killer was repositioning her killer beam on the hurricane’s eye wall as originally planned. 

Within five minutes, the heat ray receded to over one hundred miles away. 

The Abraham Lincoln was saved by less than half a kilometer in distance, and in less than thirty seconds.   



 

 

 

 

 

 

86

Henri
The wind gusts were down to less than one hundred kilometers an hour. The sea had begun receding from the Puerto Plata downtown area. 

As the water level dropped, destruction beyond belief was being exposed. Not one human habitation within the city below the third floor had been spared. All store fronts and shops were empty shells. The goods that used to be proudly displayed in these businesses were now just so much junk scattered as far as fifteen kilometers inland or laying on the ocean floor. 

Henri slowly regained consciousness. He was lying in the upper fronds of a palm tree about five kilometers inland from the city center. 

He tried to move and gasped as intense pain shot through his back and legs. He looked down at his feet and saw that both were pointed in impossible, grotesque positions. His left foot was pointed directly toward his back. His right foot was dangling straight down at a right angle from his right leg. The pain from the obviously broken legs and feet was excruciating. Tears formed as he attempted to move to the edge to see below him. The tears came from both the physical pain throbbing through his broken body and well as the emotional pain of having witnessed the deaths of his family as the storm surge swept away their home. 

He remembered falling from the disintegrating building as the surge hit. He vaguely remembered hitting the water and going deep below the surface. He had struggled with all his might to swim back to the surface. With the last dregs of air slipping from his burning lungs, he had broken the surface. He’d treaded water long enough to grab a wooden door that floated past him. Heaving himself up on the door, he collapsed and gasped for air. 

The wind-driven rain stung like a millions bee stings. The surge was quickly carrying him inland on his makeshift raft. 

He had seen the surge cover the floor where his mother’s apartment had been located. He knew that his mother and siblings would have been clutching each other as the seawater poured into their home. 

Henri moaned as he thought of the panic and fear that his family must have felt as the water smothered the life from their bodies. 

He knew that if he recovered from this disaster, he would dedicate his life to revenging his family’s death. Someone would pay. The only question was who that would be.

He slipped back into a troubled sleep and was found by a local farmer returning home on the following day. The farmer took the boy in and the farmer’s family tended Henri until his injuries healed. 

Henri thanked the family for their aid and went in search of what had happened to his own family. He became another refugee living in a large tent city on the outskirts of what had been Puerto Plata. 

He found records indicating his mother’s body had been found two days after the storm passed. She had been clutching one of his younger brothers’ bodies tightly to her bosom. There was no indication of which brother it had been. The army had cremated the two. 

Of his other sibling, no trace was ever found. 

Henri cried every day as he returned from his searches for his family members. 

He was alone.                

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

87

Killing Edna
Storm Killer resumed its intended mission as Edna skirted the north shore of the Dominican Republic. Its eye was ninety kilometers off the coast, but the winds whipping the island beaches were measured at over four hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. Rain was falling at the rate of ten centimeters an hour. 

The city of San Felipe de Puerto Plata, often referred to as simply Puerto Plata, was home to over one hundred and thirty thousand souls. Edna hit at high tide, and the sea, pushed by Edna’s tremendous winds, cause that city to be hit by a thirteen-meter storm surge. 

The entire city had been inundated with seawater up to the third floor of its highest buildings. Deaths were being estimated at over one hundred thousand from just this one urban center. 

Edna was a true monster and it remained pointed directly at Florida. 

Over the next thirty-six hours, Storm Killer lived up to its name. By proper application of its heat ray to the exact points in the storm, Edna began losing her punch. Just as the designers had reasoned, the weather engine of the storm was short-circuiting. Edna dropped from being the largest and strongest category-five hurricane ever recorded to a modest, but still dangerous, category three storm.   

The weakened Edna lashed Florida, The Miami area sustained damage commiserate with the storm’s strength. Five people died and property damage was about one billion dollars.

But Storm Killer had proved it could weaken hurricanes. It had attacked the world’s strongest hurricane ever recorded and significantly weakened it. True, it had caused the record-strength storm, but it was not the technology’s fault. It was the fault of a group of treasonous individuals. Once the technology was applied as designed, it reversed the effects to a manageable level within a day. 

The tropical weather of the world would never again be outside man’s ability to form and shape.     



 

 

 

 

 

 

88

Wrap Up
Two months after Edna the investigations were wrapped up. After multiple interrogations of the prisoners and a tremendous coordinated fact-finding effort by the Storm Killer security team, the FBI, the Secret Service, NASA Security, and the CIA, the story seemed clear. Kim and Lt. James were finally allowed to write their final report.

Rose Magruder laid the report on the President’s desk and simply said, “The final report’s here.” She left the room as the President picked up the “Eyes Only” binder and began reading.   

According to the report, Dr. Rosen approached his two most brilliant and beloved students with an offer of twenty-five million dollars for each if they assisted him in discrediting the Storm Killer project. Dr. Rosen played on their greed, their mutual interest in lowering man’s impact of the natural earth processes and reduced global warming, and their idolization of Dr. Rosen as their mentor to get them to join in his plot. 

Brad Bolino brought Rafael Denuza into the plot as his paid soldier. He did so anonymously so Rafael could not identify him. Rafael knew him only as “The Boss”. Rafael’s family had needed money for his mother’s cancer surgery. An added bonus was Rafael’s avid, almost obsessive, interest in the “green” state of the Earth.

Rafael brought his stepsister, Dr. Francine Cruz, into the plot. She assisted him because Rafael was her half-brother and family was of utmost importance to her. Bolino used Francine as a casual sex partner to keep tabs on her and to learn what her brother may have told her about the plot. 

Bolino needed to appear to be ill to the point of being confined to his quarters at the times he was out executing portions of the plan Dr. Rosen had devised. He had a very bad allergy to oranges, but withheld that information when compiling his medical history for this mission. He managed to obtain an orange and scraped off the zest. By eating a little of the zest over a three-day period, he exhibited all the symptoms of a bad cold. 

Francine, who, by now, had developed some feelings for Bolino because of their sexual trysts, believed his complaint of a cold and treated him without performing a routine examination on him. 

Bolino admitted he had ordered Rafael to draw Kim Danby to the safety closet. The investigation was going too smoothly for the three conspirators’ tastes. After discussing the situation with Dr. Rosen and getting his agreement, Greg Ballard told Bolino to go ahead with his plan and have Rafael capture Kim. Their intention was to slow the investigation as much as possible and hopefully divert the team’s attention in a different direction.   

Right after being arrested, Bolino tried to push the murder of Rafael onto Greg, but Kim had quickly ended that charade by asking to see the bottoms of the shoes each of them were wearing. When Brad raised his right foot, the missing ribs of his shoe sole matched perfectly to the pictures Kim snapped with her cell phone at the murder site. 

Greg was the primary contact man with Dr. Rosen. He, in turn, passed all instructions to Bolino. He instructed Bolino to do whatever needed to be done to ensure success of the plot. This, Bolino interpreted as permission to eliminate Rafael. 

The plotters thought that the station’s senior staff would automatically put the station in ‘standby mode’ when the first actions of sabotage occurred. But they were surprised that the station continued normal operation. 

The report went on to provide details of how Bolino pushed for Kim to be assigned over Lt. James to run the investigation. He knew of her drug habit and thought she would be the weaker leader. He hoped that her assignment would cause friction and jealousy within the investigation team. He didn’t realize that Lt. James and Kim had developed strong feelings for each other, or that those feelings continued to increase as the investigation proceeded.  

Ballard, at the first act of sabotage, took a few minutes from the airlock repair to go to Core City and wire the explosives to bring down the crystal lab. The lab’s crashing was intended as a simple diversion to take the attention off the true plot to discredit and disable the station.  

Bolino sabotaged the reflective film array so that the technicians responsible for doing so could not turn off the heat ray.  

Kim finally figured out how Hoch’s death had been staged when she received a couple of fresh pieces of evidence. 

After the crisis was over, the report outlined, Hoch’s body had been shipped to Earth for an autopsy to be performed by The L.E. McHenry Medical Examiner Facility, in Brevard County. Cape Canaveral, where the shuttle carrying the body landed, is in Brevard County, giving that ME office jurisdiction of the body. The autopsy found two burn marks on Hoch’s side. These burn marks were consistent with a TASER burn according to the ME. 

Kim found the TASER among Bolino’s belongings in his quarters. This was dusted for prints and his fingerprints were found all over the tool. Further, the TASER electrodes exactly fit the burn marks on Hoch’s body. DNA tests on two small pieces of charred flesh caught in the TASER prongs had conclusively proved it was the weapon used to disable Hoch.    

Kim reasoned that Bolino set himself up as the hostage. When Hoch arrived, she theorized, Bolino must have been lying on the floor. Hoch probably bent down to check his vitals and Bolino hit him in the side with a TASER he’d hidden under the edge of the bed. Once disabled, it had been easy for Bolino to take Hoch’s weapon and shoot him with it. 

Bolino then reported Hoch’s shooting and attacked Kim when the lieutenant went to get the Doctor. Bolino played things well enough to convince Kim and the Lieutenant of his version of the murder and that they should entrust him with returning the chip to Layne Bartlett.  

The report went on to discuss Dr. Rosen’s deception of both Bolino and Ballard when he decided they were expendable and ensure the station was destroyed with the crew on board. They were near panicked in trying to get off the station before the missile struck.

The investigation uncovered that a senior senator of the Mexican Federal government orchestrated and financed the whole operation. He was being held in a Mexican federal prison, awaiting the wheels of justice. The United States asked for extradition but Mexico also wanted a portion of his hide. The Dominican Republic authorities also declared that they wanted to try him for crimes against humanity in the death of over three hundred thousand of their citizens. There might be enough of him to go around if he lived long enough. 

The same band of countries was searching for Dr. Rosen. His elaborate deception in travel left the combined investigative bodies of six nations desperately searching for him. His trail had gone cold in Lima, Peru. 

No one remembered seeing him even though the immigration forms indicated he had arrived in country. They checked various local hotels and found one showing that he had checked in and left the next day. No one on the hotel’s day shift remembered seeing him. The night shift clerk who checked him in died in a car accident one week after the incident.

The hotel had no security cameras so there was no visual record of the guests’ coming and going. He just seemed to vanish into thin air at that point. 

The thought among the various investigative agencies was that he chose that particular hotel because of its lack of cameras and the fact that the night shift and day shift switched at three AM. This meant no one from the night shift would be around when he left. 

The trail had grown cold by the time the report was written and assembled but there was always the possibility that he would be found. 



 

 

 

 

 

 

89

Rose And The President
After the Storm Killer incident, the press had a field day with the President’s involvement in the events. But the public had seen the results when Storm Killer had fulfilled its mission. They forgave and forgot. 

Of course, they never knew about the missile, or the firing of Rose Magruder. The missile launch had been quietly buried within the military and NASA. The Palomar observatory personnel had been ‘strongly requested’ by the Secret Service and the FBI to forget about the incident. 

After her firing and reinstatement, Rose received a promotion. When the facts were in about how Rosen had put his plot together, it was decided at the highest levels that the “Killer” technology series needed a new security organization. Thus was born Killer Security Group or KSG. This organization would be responsible for securing the Killer assets and ensuring that the assigned personnel were loyal to the projects. The Killer series included Storm Killer and a new project, Night Killer, which was being formed and created. A third project was already underway and was named simply “Killer”.    

Rose Magruder was named KSG Director. She reported directly to the President.  

She was responsible for carrying the basketball. The basketball was a code name for a device similar to the one called the football that was always near the President. 

The football could launch a nuclear war. The basketball could destroy the various Killer stations. It had been decided that the technology used for any application could be misused as a weapon as the Storm Killer crisis had demonstrated. So the basketball was developed. With this device the President could selectively trigger a very large detonation on any or all of the Killer stations. This ensured that if any station were hijacked as a weapon, it could be destroyed instantly. 

This was the public description of what the basketball was for. The confidential addition was that the President could also use the basketball to use any one or the entire complement of Killer stations as a weapon. The basketball effectively locked out station personnel control and overrode it with a master control residing in the White House Situation Room’s Joint Chief’s operation area.

Rose had become the single most powerful woman on Earth, or in space.     



 

        

 

  

        

 

90

Kim And The Lieutenant 
“Randall, pass me the jam, please,” Kim asked her new husband. Lieutenant Randall James reached for the jam and handed it to his bride. They sat on the veranda of a plush resort in Cancun. The bridal suite had been given to them as a wedding present by the government of Mexico for ‘outstanding service to the Mexican state.’

Actually, it had come from the efforts made by one Antonio De La Cruz, the Mexican government’s newest state senator. He’d sent a note with the certificate presenting the bridal suite to them. The note simply read, Thank you for keeping your word. You were right, inevitable discovery got him. I’ll miss him, but he did something very wrong. Via Con Dios, Antonio.    

They had been married for almost fifteen hours. This marriage had come after an excruciating and agonizing stint at one of the world’s best drug rehab centers. 

The cleansing of Kim’s system of the drugs and the long-term battle to keep her off them had tested their relationship to the limits. She called him every name in the book, curse at him, and even spit at him. He, though, was true to his word. He stayed by her until she was clean and healthy. 

Earlier, Kim had called room service and placed their breakfast order while her new husband showered and shaved.

Room service promptly delivered a breakfast of waffles with strawberries and whipped cream while Kim luxuriated in the whirlpool bathtub.

She came out of the bath toweling her hair dry and saw her husband reading a note. He looked up and waved at the table where a pitcher of orange juice and a magnum of Tattinger Blanc De Blanc 1993 nestled next to their breakfast plates. He said, “It appears we’ve received a honeymoon gift from Rose Magruder. This do-it-yourself Mimosa kit arrived with our breakfast.”

Kim laughed, “And what does our new boss have to say.” 

He passed her the note and she read:


Dear Randall and Kim,

Happy Honeymoon! 

Please accept this small gift as a token of my regards for you. I wish you every happiness!

Your new jobs await you when you get back from your honeymoon. 

Randall, as my new Commander of the KSG Enforcement Division, I have a short assignment for you in Tokyo working with the management team for the development of the Japan/China Storm Killer station. 

And Kim, my dear, as my new Commander of the KSG Investigations Division, I have an equally short assignment for you at the new Washington, DC Night Killer station. 

So enjoy your honeymoon, and get ready for some hard work when you get back. 

Love,

Rose Magruder 
Kim folded the note and tucked it away. She made a Mimosa for each of them and they enjoyed the fresh drink as part of the wonderful breakfast.

After breakfast, they stood by the railing looking out on the blue Caribbean Ocean. She grabbed him tightly around the waist and said, “I never thanked you.”

“For what?”

“For being there for me during my cleaning up and my rehab.” 

“I told you I would be there, didn’t I?”

“Yes. I was terrible to you. You should hate me for what I did and said to you.” 

“I forgive you. Now shut up and kiss me.” 

And they did. They kissed passionately for a very long time.    

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

91

Francine’s Lover
Francine looked out the window at the Potomac River moving swiftly beneath her. The plane was on final approach to Washington’s Reagan Airport.  It has been an uneventful flight from Orlando in very good weather. 

     The plane landed with a screech of tires. Francine always griped the arm rests when landing at this airport. It was an old airport with very short runways. She always feared they would run off the runway into the Potomac.

     Luckily, this trip, the planes brakes were sufficient and the plane taxied to the gate without getting one drop of water on it.

     She stood and gathered her things. Shortly. She would be seeing her lover for the first time since the Storm Killer incident and Francine’s six-month detention while all of the facts was sorted out.     

She had had many days to think through her emotions, and feelings. 

She had finally been able to put her brother’s death into perspective. He had done it to himself and tried to take her with him. But, at the end, he had tried to protect her. 

She was very concerned. She would shortly be facing her lover. They had been together ever since college. The last five years had been very rough, what her lover in Washington and Francine in Florida or on the Strom Killer station. They only managed to steal kisses and hold embraces for quick moments afraid that someone would find them out. While they were both free, unattached adults, they simply had not wanted to become fodder for the inside-the-beltway rumor mill.

Now, it was all out in the open about how Francine had been sleeping with Brad Bolino and how she provided her brother with aid and assistance. She was not concerned what people thought about what she had done for her brother. After all, he was family. 

What worried her was how sad her lover had sounded when she had been forced to admit that she had been having sexual liaisons with Brad. Francine knew her lover was hurting badly from her cheating. 

Francine had tried to explain on several long and painful phone calls that there was no love involved. It had simply been sex. And when all the facts were out, Francine had pointed out that multiple people had manipulated her into the affair. 

To this her lover had simply said, “If you really loved someone, nobody should be able to manipulate you to cheat.”  

Francine had requested that her lover not toss the relationship away until they had a chance for a face-to-face meeting. Then, if Francine could not prove her love, they could split up. 

Today was the day for that meeting. It was a viciously cold day. She pulled her coat tighter around her throat.  

Francine had said she would take a cab from the airport to the townhouse they sometimes had shared. She had a key and would let herself in. Her lover had to be with the President until 4 PM. 

Francine looked at her watch as the cab wove its way through the DC traffic. It was now 1:30. She had time for a shower before the confrontation.  Confrontation? Why did I pick that word? I hope it is more of reconciliation.

The cab pulled up in front of the familiar brownstone townhouse where she and her lover had been so happy for so long. She paid the cab diver and hauled her garment bag up the front steps. Dropping the bag, she pulled her key ring out of her coat and found the door key. 

She opened the door, picked up her garment bag and stepped inside. She closed the door and looked around the lower landing she stood on. Ahead were the steps leading up to the bedroom and another set of steps leading down to the basement family room. Francine smiled as she thought about all of the times she and her lover had made love in both of those rooms. 

She dragged her bag up the steps to the master bedroom and threw it on the king size canopy bed with the beautiful bedspread they had searched for so long and bought together. 

The taxi ride had taken longer than she thought what with the awful traffic these days. She looked at her watch and saw that it was already after 3 PM.

Just enough time for a hot bubble bath, she thought as she peeled off her clothes.

Francine ran the water and slipped into the hot bath. She closed her eyes and lay back in the roman tub. She was startled awake by the sound of the front door closing downstairs. 

She almost panicked. My God, I fell asleep.   

She jumped out of the tub and began toweling her self off. She was turned toward the sink when she heard the door bathroom squeak open. She looked up in the mirror and saw her lover standing at the door. 

She turned and ran into the welcoming arms. She looked up at the face and said, “My darling. I’m so sorry for all of the hurt I’ve caused you. Can you forgive me?”

The arms tightened around her body as those familiar soft lips touched hers. 

“Of course I can. I’ll love you forever.” 

Francine smiled as she looked into Lara’s eyes and kissed her. Together they walked back into the bedroom.

  



 

     

        

 

 

 

92

The End
Carlos stepped off the plane into the broiling sun of Riyadh. It was brutally hot as he walked across the tarmac to the terminal building. 

He quickly cleared customs and grabbed a cab from the queue that formed in front of the taxi sign. He could have had a hired limo to be waiting to pick him up, but he wanted anonymity on this trip.  

He instructed the driver to take him to an address in the Olaya District of the city. The district was the very heart of the city. It boasted being a thriving commercial and posh residential district, and offered plush accommodations, entertainment, dining and top-of-the-line shopping. It was a district only multimillionaires could afford to live in. 

The taxi dropped him two doors down from a plush three-story home with a large gated security fence around it. He waited for the taxi to leave and walked to the front of his target.

He had worked for six months to find this house. His last assignment from his benefactor had been to find this house and its resident. Now, he had found it and his mission was almost over. 

Carlos rang the bell on the gate.  He waited. Nobody answered. 

He rang again with the same result.

Looking around to see if anyone was watching, he took a plastic card with a wire attached to a device that looked like an Ipod. He inserted the card into the gate card reader, flicked a switch on the “Ipod” and waited. Ten seconds later, he heard the gate lock click open and the buzzer sound announcing the gate was unlocked.

He walked through the gate, tucked the card and device back in his suit coat pocket and walked to the front door. He crouched down and inspected the front door lock and latch. He snorted contempuously at the ancient lock, and, using a lockpick, had the door open in about the same amount of time it took to open the gate. 

He had already obtained blueprints of the house and knew that there was a butler’s pantry connecting the dining room to the kitchen. In this pantry was a broom closet. He made his way to the closet and took up as comfortable position as possible. It should not be a long wait. The target should be back within the hour.

The target had been difficult to find. Carlos had traced him to Lima. He had been lucky there when he found a desk clerk that remember his man’s arrival and had also seen what he thought was the same man leave the next morning. He had provided an excellent description of the man leaving the hotel. 

Carlos ensured he was the only one with this information by staging a traffic accident for the unlucky desk clerk. This effectively ended the trail for anyone else attempting to track his target.

Forty minutes after Carlos let himself into the house, he heard a key rattled in the front door. The door opened and closed and then footsteps approaching. Carlos reached in his pocket for the items he needed to complete his mission. He put on his gloves and waited.

He’d purposely left the closet door slightly ajar so he could see anyone passing the door.    

A man passed the door on the way to the kitchen. He had a cloth shopping bag filled with groceries dangling from his hand as he walked by. Carlos immediately recognized the man even though the man’s hair was a different color than he remembered.

He had gone no more than two steps past the broom closet when the closet door flew open and, in one quick motion, Carlos stepped up behind the man. Carlos had wrapped the piano wire around his gloved hands and quickly twisted the wire around the man’s neck.

He lifted the man’s body completely off the floor through the amount of strength he applied to the garrote. The wire sliced through the man’s neck in less than a second. Blood began spurting from the open arteries. The dying man’s brain lived for a few more seconds. 

Just before he died, Dr. Rosen heard Carlos whisper in his ear, “Senator Gutierrez sends his greetings.”