Cyborg 02 - Operation Nuke

by Martin Caidin

  CHAPTER 2

  He sat immobile, a hulking Buddha, halfway around the world from Sam Franks, but already linked to him in a way neither man could be aware of. Jackson McKay looked at the report on his desk, then shook his head, a slow gesture that said a great deal to the man seated across his desk.

  Oscar Goldman watched the director of the Office of Special Operations with customary fascination. Thirty years of intelligence and espionage work. An efficient killer with his hands or any weapon at his disposal. A veteran of British Intelligence and Interpol. One of the men who made up the hard core of the World War II Office of Strategic Services. From OSS to CIA, and then this new organization, OSO—Office of Special Operations; specialist non pareil to all other security and intelligence organizations. McKay was one of the few men in the Washignton intelligence hierarchy who was not soundly cursed by those he worked with.

  And Oscar Goldman was his right hand, alter ego. Goldman no more looked his part than the corpulent McKay did his. Goldman was an unimposing figure at seven inches less than six feet, but his apprenticeship had been served as a special-agent paratrooper and ranger. McKay believed Goldman was a genius in sizing up people, converting them to service for OSO. He was also a man with an extraordinary grasp of weapons technology. He held that rare distinction of being able to correlate an enormous quantity of facts from various disciplines.

  Goldman was also responsible for Steve Austin. Not the Colonel Steve Austin known to the world as test pilot and commander of Apollo 17, the last manned flight to the moon. In fact, not an ordinary man at all.

  There was a Steve Austin the outside world knew nothing about.

  Cyborg. A man who was humanly vulnerable yet more than a man, an exquisite blending of shattered body, biological engineering and electronics—a new cybernetic organism.

  The man they looked upon as the first cyborg had proven an extraordinary new element of OSO, and McKay thought of him now as he looked at the report on his desk, and considered a mission that—again unknown to any of them—would link Austin with the fortunes of Sam Franks and world forces only forming at the time. McKay had not been present that morning Austin had sailed an incredible swooping curve back from the thin edges of space in a nasty metal beast they called the M3F5—prelude to giant space shuttles to come. The morning when the wicked little machine slammed into the hard, dry desert floor of California, ripped across the desert disintegrating, mangling a helpless Steve Austin. One moment superb test pilot, astronaut, human being of special talent and intelligence.

  The next, when the shattered wreckage ground to a stop in the desert, there was no man inside. Instead the rescue crews removed a battered, crushed, torn, and lacerated thing—mercifully unconscious. The rescue team was good, the medical team incredible. And one doctor above all the others. Rudy Wells, bearded, moving through medicine and beyond; the only man who could venture, through his love and empathy, into the terror of Austin’s mind.

  The list ran through McKay’s thoughts: both legs amputated. The left arm mangled, torn from the body. Ribs shattered, jaw smashed; replaced with metal alloys and plastics and ceramics. Beautiful open heart surgery and implantation of a Hufnagel valve. There was more: blinded in his left eye. Skull fracture. Concussion.

  The surgeons, especially two named Ashburn and Killian, kept the body alive. Rudy Wells attended to the mind and spirit of Steve Austin, subjecting himself willingly (because it was necessary) to Austin’s abuse.

  And Steve Austin survived. Precariously, but he survived. Wells kept him unconscious for weeks. Time was the friend now. Time for the shock to dissipate from the system, for trillions of cells to reform and to adjust to whatever life decreed for their intelligence of new inner creation. And then that was past.

  The bionics laboratory was carved deep into the flanks of the Colorado Rockies. When OSO director McKay learned what had happened to a man named Steve Austin, he immediately dispatched Oscar Goldman. The bionics laboratory was engineering and life sciences and cybernetics and biology wrapped up into a single gleaming package. There were men there who knew how to run through a giant computer every element of construction and movement of, for example, the human arm and hand. The computer digested what it learned, but so extraordinary was the creation of flesh and blood, sinew and tendon and muscle, veins and arteries and nerves, of bone and marrow and pulsing liquid flow, of trillions of cells, that the computer taxed even its own capabilities in reducing to intelligible numbers the handwork of God. The numbers finally were translated to digits with special meaning to eagerly waiting scientists and doctors and technicians. In those mathematical symbols they found the blueprints for creating a living simulation, fashioned from artificial materials, of what had been a human arm. Or leg, or elbow, or rib, or knee, or finger. It could all be reduced to digital form and from that form could be recreated a living entity.

  Some argued the semantics of “living.” The human body functions on messages carried through electrical impulses generated by electro-chemical reaction. Nervous energy is electrical energy, even if the wonderful intricacy of the human form seems to deserve a better analogy than to a weak self-powered battery.

  Bionics did not contest the semantics. Nor did it solicit agreement. Their creed, under the direction of Dr. Michael Killian, was the work itself. Bionics. Bios from the Greek for life, and ics to represent in the manner after. A bionics limb was a recreation of a living member, and Steve Austin—cyborg—functioned in a manner as unusual as the concept from which he emerged.

  His heart valves were damaged? Replace them with the Hufnagel valve and supporting internal apparatus. His skull was crushed? Replace the bone with cesium and with new alloys where needed. Design a spongy center layer and another outer layer to protect the brain case inside. He could then endure a direct blow ten times greater—without suffering injury—than the sledgehammer thuds that cracked his skull in the first place.

  Replace ribs. Install—and install was the proper word—added tendons, plastic valves, arteries and veins where needed.

  Blinded in his left eye? Well, they weren’t that good. Not Dr. Killian, nor Dr. Wells, nor anyone else, because the human eye is a miracle of jelly and water and light-sensitive elements and rods and electrical impulses trickling their way through bundles of nerves to a gray convoluted mass of three pounds encased within the skull—no, they couldn’t yet restore vision when the optic nerve was mangled, and Austin’s optical nerve was so much biological garbage. But they could make use of the area where there had been an eyeball to build a marvelously small and efficient camera into where his living camera system had been. Steve Austin became a man with one living eye and one extraordinary camera that recorded on tiny supersensitive film what its human carrier saw with the living eye.

  None of this could compare with the miracle of the recreated living limbs—to the arm with its elbow and its bionics bones and cartilage and the never-believed dexterity of wrist and fingers and opposed digit, as well as the legs with their computer-directed systems.

  It was one thing to construct the limbs that were to receive the nerve impulses flowing to and from the brain, nerve impulses that were electrical signals. It was another to mimic the nerve fibers and systems for transmitting the impulses from the brain into the spinal cord and on down the message networks. To Steve Austin’s arm stump they double-engaged the bionics and the natural bone to exceed by far the original level of strength and resistance. They connected actual nerves and muscles with bionics nerves and muscles. But the signals that came through, while they well served natural flesh and its constituent elements, were hopelessly weak for a bionics system. So within the arm and the legs went small nuclear-powered generators that spun silently at speeds measured in thousands of revolutions per second.

  The signal flashed through Steve Austin until it reached the part of him that was living by computer and machine lathe, where it was sensed and flashed to an amplifier. Now it was retransmitted at many times greater strength than
when received. The small nuclear generators fed power through the artificial duplications of nature’s pulleys and cables, which moved, twisted, pulled, bent, contracted, squeezed. But artificial fingertips tended to be insensitive, and a cybernetic hand could crush human bone with no more effort than was needed to pulp a rose. So they added vibrating pads, sensors, amplifiers, feedback. Now the steel-boned hand that could kill with a single transmitted impulse could also lovingly caress a lover’s skin.

  For months Steve Austin, reborn as cyborg, went through hell to create a physical and emotional knowledge and acceptance of himself. For months he stumbled and fell, weaved and swayed; his systems jerked spasmodically, they shorted and surged; he was clumsy, crude, full of rage. But finally, with the devoted help of a giant of a man—in size and heart—by the name of Marty Schiller, a man with two artificial limbs, Steve Austin made it, and learned there were compensations.

  If the bionics arm was not quite the same as the original limb, it was in many ways superior. The same for the legs. Steve Austin’s arm was more than a human arm; it was also capable of performing as a battering ram, a vise, a bludgeon—a tool and a weapon. His legs were also tremendous pistons. His heart and circulatory systems served a body without the need of supporting two legs and an arm. The bionics systems with their nuclear amplifiers attended to all energy needs, and so Austin’s endurance increased dramatically. He was dependent as ever on his heart and lungs and other systems. But he could run a day and a night because there was no energy drain from the legs hammering against the earth.

  But what of the psychology of a man who had suffered impotence—not through genital injury or damage to the nerve network splicing the spinal column. No, through fear that no woman could feel or make love to a creature half-man and half-machine.

  That too had been overcome; not scientifically but by the oldest, most effective potion—the love of a good woman. Austin survived his crises, but he was still a man, and whatever superior powers he now enjoyed were still subject to the many ways he was vulnerable. A bullet through the heart would kill him. He could drown, suffocate, be poisoned, or crushed.

  His defenses did soar in efficiency, his reactions swifter than the most skilled athlete’s. His body made him potentially a killing mechanism, especially when integrated with miniaturized weaponry in his bionics arm and legs.

  Jackson McKay had authorized twelve million dollars to Project Cyborg, and it had already paid off in two assignments so far: A mission into a secret Soviet submarine base on the northeast coast of South America, on which Austin learned information that later brought about the end of that base. And a mission into Egypt against Soviet-sponsored Arab extremists, for which he needed the skill of a pilot, acquired many years before, plus the extraordinary endurance of the cyborg. Again a critical threat had been eliminated, although the toll on Steve Austin—as man and cyborg—had been considerable.

  Men heal, cyborgs don’t, but they can be repaired, rebuilt, even improved. Austin had been back at the secret bionics laboratory in Colorado for several months now. The rejuvenation process was finished. Whatever he had been before he was more now, if for no other reason than the experience as a cyborg he’d had time to acquire.

  We need him again, McKay thought as he glanced at the papers on his desk. Steve Austin was surely their best chance against the threatening events described in the report before him.

  The problem, as usual, had been dumped in OSO’s lap. CIA had burned its fingers; State was fluttering its hands in the fashion McKay had come to detest; and the military were honing their knives for a super-commando firefight. None of them, McKay felt certain, even remotely approached a solution to the problem.

  McKay’s priority signal light flashed on his desk. He pressed the button that would pick up his voice from anywhere in the room. “Go ahead.”

  “Colonel Austin is here, sir,” a secretary said.

  McKay glanced at Goldman. “Send him in.”

  The door slid noiselessly to one side and Steve Austin stepped through. The door closed immediately. For the moment Austin stood quietly, only his eyes moving. Eye, singular, Goldman corrected himself. He looked at the ex-fighter pilot, six feet one inch tall, flat-bellied and wide-shouldered on a lean-muscled frame. An aura of confidence, blue eyes. Eye, the left one is plastic, Goldman again reminded himself. Those incredible bionic limbs . . . He should have weighed 180 pounds. He didn’t. He weighed nearly 240 because of the metal and the other systems, but he carried it all with ease. No, not quite, thought Goldman. He carries it with the indifference of any man who knows what he is.

  McKay rose ponderously to his feet, in itself extraordinary. McKay preferred the pull of gravity holding him to his seat. “Good to see you,” McKay said. Austin, with the fluid movement they’d learned to expect from him, slid into the one empty seat before the desk.

  Jackson McKay made a steeple of his thick fingers and peered over them at Steve Austin.

  “Do you know, for example; how to set off an atomic bomb?”

  “I do, and you knew the answer to the question before you asked it. So why ask?”

  “Because,” said McKay, “we may want you to steal an atom bomb. Defuse it. Or perhaps even set it off, as well.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Steve Austin leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, a reflex of his constant desire to at least appear ordinary whenever possible.

  “Any bomb in particular?” he asked in answer to McKay’s remarkable statement.

  “It’s difficult to say. At the moment, anyway, but—”

  “It could also be a thermonuclear bomb,” Oscar Goldman added.

  “If you don’t mind, please spell it out,” Austin told McKay.

  McKay did, but in his own fashion. “You once commanded a strike force of FB-111 fighter-bombers. You operated from secret fields in Canada and Alaska. You were required to be familiar with the weapons accomodated by your aircraft.”

  Austin held up his right hand with three fingers extended, not pleased with the memory. “Three thermonukes per airplane, each equal to twelve million tons of TNT.”

  “And the mechanisms?” McKay said quietly.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “But not so long that you’ve forgotten.”

  Steve looked at the OSO director. “It’s in the past. Finished. Are you suggesting I get back into that business?”

  “I suggest you get back into the nuclear weapons business. Look, I expect you, as much as any sane man, to have automatic revulsion against nuclear weapons. I also expect you know who and what I am, what this organization does, and you know that throwing bombs around is hardly the sort of thing were up to.”

  For the first time Steve Austin evaded the eyes of the heavy man behind the desk. McKay did not miss the movement. “By the way, something happened to you even before your crash, didn’t it? Something that changed you inside as much as the crash smashed you up physically.”

  “There are times, McKay,” Steve said, “when you really surprise me. You’re right. It happened out there, coming around the moon. The very first time, I mean. The effect was greatest then. And every time we had a chance to look at the earth after that, when we took the time to really look, to try to understand what we were seeing, well, it’s overwhelming. You come around this dead, cratered world and suddenly over the horizon, a quarter of a million miles away, it’s there. Home. That’s how you think of it. Like the word never had meaning before. It rolls through space, this beautiful blue world floating against the blackest black there ever was, and you feel you could look around the other side of the earth. The pictures, the films, they don’t mean anything because they’re flat. But you see it as a round ball, and you hold up both hands by the window of the spacecraft, and you can cup the world in your hands and . . . and well, all of a sudden you feel how fragile it is . . . Anyway, maybe you can at least understand why I can’t ever have anything to do with weapons that could tear apart what I saw from out there. Do you
understand?”

  “I think so,” McKay said quietly, “and that’s why, more now than ever before, it’s vital for you to be involved again with nukes.”

  Steve stared at McKay, disbelief in his eyes.

  “We need you to help stop bombs from going off.”

  “But you said something before about my stealing an atom bomb, even a thermonuke and—”

  “And maybe even setting it off,” McKay finished for him. “Look, if you have a situation where you know a bomb is intended to go off in a city, and you can get your hands on that particular weapon and there’s no way to keep it from going off, then isn’t it better to detonate the thing when it’s not in a city?”

  “That’s a hell of a lot of supposing. And who am I supposed to steal this nuke from?”

  “We don’t know that yet,” McKay said.

  “Let me really spell it out for you. We’re talking about an international black market in nuclear weapons,” Goldman said, “that can make possible the ultimate blackmail—and maybe worse.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Goldman shook his head. “I wish we were. We’ve been working on this for a long time . . . this organization and nearly every security and intelligence outfit in the world, including the Russians, Interpol, our allies and theirs. We work with anybody we can because each of us has known that sooner or later one or more nukes would get into the hands of criminals—meaning anyone who gets involved with nuclear weapons to meet a political or nationalistic goal.”

  “Or,” McKay’s voice came from behind his desk, “for cash.”

  “You are telling me,” Steve said slowly, “that people have somehow managed to get their hands on nuclear devices and have put them up for sale?”

  “Precisely,” McKay said. “Not to mention their special delivery services.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” Steve told him.

  “Why?” demanded Goldman.