Wings of Fire pm-10

by Dale Brown

  "I know."

  "He's worried about you."

  "Like hell he is. He just wants to know when we're ready to go back out there."

  Luger couldn't argue with that observation. "Fair enough-but I'm worried about you," Luger said, "and I want to know when we're going back out there to look for Wendy."

  "As soon as my son stops crying himself to sleep," Patrick replied bitterly. Again, Luger had no reply for that.

  "Been watching the news?"

  "No."

  "Susan Bailey Salaam was elected president of Egypt," Hal Briggs said. "She's got the Libyans, Sudanese, Syrians, Lebanese, Iranians, Iraqis, Jordanis, and Saudis cheering for her like she's some kind of rock star."

  '"Good for her."

  "There's talk of another United Arab Republic," Luger added. "Egypt and Syria merged for a few years back in the late fifties and early sixties under Nasser-they're saying that Susan Salaam might be able to unify the entire Arab world."

  Now Patrick's interest was piqued a bit. "Interesting. So I'll bet Martindale is calling because the Central African Petroleum Partnership called…."

  "Exactly-wanting to know if we're going to stay on the case," Briggs said.

  "What's going on out there?"

  "Salaam has brought Libya in as a partner in the cartel, for starters," Luger said.

  "Libya? Partnered up with Egypt?"

  "Hey, they're all huggy and kissy lately," Briggs said. "Egypt is giving out work visas to Libyans and Sudanese to work in Salimah like crazy-almost ten thousand persons have migrated to Salimah in just the past few days. There's already talk of Sudan, Syria, and Jordan joining the oil partnership."

  "Sounds like Egypt decided to trade jobs for peace," Patrick observed. "Good move."

  "And so far it's paying off big-time," Luger said. "Not only are they not fighting, but they're praising and cooperating with each other unlike anything anyone's ever seen."

  "So Egypt becomes the new center of the Arab world," Patrick mused.

  "Makes sense," Luger said. "Egypt is by far more powerful than any of the other countries, and they're more centrally located and strategically important, with the Suez Canal and the Salimah oil fields. They have strong ties to the Muslim world, the African world, Europe, and the West all at the same time."

  "And, last but not least, Egypt has Susan Bailey Salaam-they're calling her the reincarnation of Cleopatra," Hal Briggs added. "She was elected in a landslide and cheered in eight different African and Middle East capitals the night of her election. It's pretty amazing to watch. Less than a month ago she had almost gotten herself blown up and was on the run, being hunted down by assassins-now, she's not only president, but being considered the up-andcoming leader of the whole freakin' Arab world."

  "And naturally, the Central African Petroleum Partners are not happy with this arrangement-right?"

  "You got it," Luger said. "Egypt is the majority partner, and Salaam has been allowing more Arab and African workers in to work at Salimah, displacing the Asians and Europeans."

  "And with the price of oil hitting new highs, all those folks are getting mighty rich," Briggs added.

  "Speaking of which." David Luger held out three envelopes. "Wire-transfer receipts: our payment from the Central African Petroleum Partners. Paul made you executor of his estate."

  Patrick looked at the receipts in the envelopes, closed his eyes, then dropped them on a table. "It's a lot of money," he said softly. "But was it worth it, guys?" he asked.

  "It's never worth it when you take losses, man," Briggs said. "But we all volunteered. We're all doin' what we want to be doin'." He looked carefully at Patrick; then: "Aren't we?"

  Patrick did not-could not-answer.

  SKY MASTERS INC. TEST FACILITY,

  TONOPAH TEST RANGE, NEVADA

  THE NEXT MORNING

  Jon Masters found Kelsey Duffield at a computer workstation in the research library, sound asleep, with a blanket thrown over her shoulders. Her mother, Cheryl, was asleep in a chair in a corner of the room, but awoke immediately when Jon entered-and she did not look happy.

  "I've been looking for you guys. Your phones are off," Jon whispered.

  "Kelsey has been working all night-she refused to leave," Cheryl said. "She's been on the phone to scientists and laboratories all over the world. I finally had to shut it off-we had no chance of getting any rest otherwise." She awakened her daughter and told her to go to the bathroom. Kelsey walked out, rubbing her eyes and shuffling along like kids who just woke up do.

  "Poor kid. She's a trouper, that's for sure."

  "'Trouper'? She's being overworked-and I'd say this verges on abuse," Cheryl said angrily. "Keeping her locked up in this place… spending days on end on that computer or in the lab. It's ridiculous. You can't expect her to keep on working like this."

  "Cheryl, I'm not expecting her to do any of this," Jon said. "Kelsey is the one who walked into library and hasn't come out."

  "Come out? How can she? Security officers besiege us every time we turn around. It wastes almost half a day going in and out of security. Kelsey feels less intruded upon by just staying here."

  "Well, that's the conclusion most of us come to," Jon admitted with a sheepish grin. "It's almost as if the Air Force designs the security this way to make us work harder."

  "It's not funny, Dr. Masters."

  "No one is forcing her to do this, Cheryl. She's doing it all on her own." He looked at her carefully. "You really are worried, aren't you?"

  "Of course I am."

  "Are you telling me that Kelsey's never worked like this before? This is the first time she's been so.."

  "Obsessed? Single-minded? Manic?" Cheryl exploded. "That's what I'm saying, Dr. Masters. Sure, she's worked hard before-she works hard on everything she's ever done. But never like this. I'm really worried about her."

  "I don't have kids, Cheryl, so I'm no expert," Jon said, "but if I didn't know better, I'd say Kelsey is…"

  "What?"

  "Having fun," Jon said. When Cheryl rolled her eyes in disbelief, Jon went on, "No, really. Putting together inertial confinement chambers and laser generators is like.. like putting together a dollhouse or a Lego castle is to most kids."

  "Jon, you're wrong. Completely, absolutely wrong." But even as she said the words, Jon could see that she really didn't believe they were true. "I wish this never happened. I wish Kelsey was just a normal, everyday kid."

  "Cheryl, she is just an everyday normal kid-but with an incredible gift," Jon said. "I think you see the security and the weapons and the horror and destruction all this could cause, and you wonder and worry about how this will affect your daughter."

  "Of course I'm worried!"

  "But have you looked at your daughter lately… I mean, stepped back and really looked at her?" Jon asked. "I mean, I've never had kids, but I'm a kid at heart. And I've seen supersmart kids before. Some of them are really full of themselves. They'll talk about the offers they get from universities and big companies and consultants to work for them; they'll talk about their stock portfolios and patents and the money they're making."

  He paused, staring out into space as if reliving some scene in his mind's eye. "I know about those kids-because I was one. I am probably still one." He chuckled. "Man, I used to love stuffing one down some four-star general's shirt. He thought he knew everything-I couldn't wait to blow him away. Every tactic, every procedure, every concept he had, I had a response or an alternative that he never thought about. I used to cream the big corporate CEOs daily. They wouldn't give me the time of dayuntil I showed them a design for something they absolutely had to have. I was a third of their age and had bank accounts and portfolios bigger than theirs. I… was… the greatest."

  "Kelsey has done all that stuff too," he said softly. "She's built companies, lectured at Cornell, given presentations in front of the National Science Foundation and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. She has almost as many patents as I have and she's a fourth
my age But you know the difference between Kelsey and those other Generation-X nerds? The other bozos tell you all the stuff about themselves-myself included. I had to go out and find out all the stuff about Kelsey. She doesn't brag about all her accomplishments." He looked at Cheryl and smiled. "Maybe that has as much to do with you as it does with her?" For the first time in a very long time, Cheryl Duffield smiled.

  Jon smiled back, then looked around. "Where did she go?"

  "Bathroom."

  "That was a few minutes ago," Jon said. "Uh-oh. If I know Kelsey, she's not going to come back here right away. I know where she is." Jon was correct: He walked directly to the AL-52 laser lab and found Kelsey with her laser goggles on, punching instructions into a computer beside the large mounting racks where the components of the plasma laser were mounted. Kelsey wore only a pair of socks on her feet, and her Top Secret ID badge was pinned to the tops of her underwear peeking over the top of her pants.

  Jon was simply and unabashedly dumbfounded whenever he walked into this lab. In an amazingly short period of time, he and Kelsey had managed to build a full-scale working model of a laser that had been virtually unheard of. The bench that the laser was mounted to was the same size as the interior of the B-52 aircraft; the laser waveguides were mounted in an adjacent room, and the power capacitors and other support equipment were mounted in other rooms as well, networked here for the tests.

  The room was dominated by a large aluminum sphere seven feet in diameter, with a number of electrodes and cables running around the outside. This was the main component-the inertial confinement chamber. Set on the inside surface of the sphere were four hundred diode lasers, like powerful laser pointers, aimed into the center of the sphere. Inside the sphere, magnetrons-magnetic gunswere also set up, pointing into the center as well. A tube ran through the center, and there was an opening in the front end of the sphere that connected the confinement chamber to a large cylinder with thousands of rectangles etched into it-the laser generators-and from there to the Faraday oscillator that would collect the light energy from the generators and produce a laser beam.

  The tube fed tiny pellets of deuterium and tritium into the sphere, and the laser beams bombarded the pellets. The deuterium and tritium elements in the gaseous cloud that formed in the center of the sphere released energy particles but were then trapped, focused, and squeezed by the laser beams until the heat built up to a point where the elements no longer repelled one another but were fused together. When they fused, they created a massive release of heat and energy. Further squeezed by the magnetrons, the fused particles suddenly snapped apart, creating a cloud of free electrons and positively charged particles called ions-a plasma field. The magnetrons then focused the field and sent it to the laser generator, where the plasma energy stripped high-energy particles from neodymium, creating laser light.

  Despite its size and complexity, it was a perfect example of simplicity and functionality. It weighed less than thirty thousand pounds, less than half the weight of the chemical laser it was replacing. The inertial confinement chamber was a simple reengineering of the plasma-yield warhead Jon Masters had invented years earlier-instead of simply releasing the plasma energy created inside, the chamber was designed to channel it to the laser generator. It used virtually no power-just enough to light up the diode lasers inside the confinement chamber and to keep the magnetrons firing.

  Unfortunately, that was the problem-and Kelsey's current headache. "How's it looking, Kelsey?" Jon asked, ignoring Cheryl's concerned expression-better get a status update fast before Cheryl decided to escort her daughter out of here.

  "Horrible," Kelsey said. "I still haven't been able to control the heat buildup and keep it away from the magnetrons."

  "That's a problem I never had to contend with," Jon admitted. "With the plasma-yield warhead, I wanted to let the heat build up-we got a bigger plasma field and we could do more damage. Here, we want to control it."

  It took an incredible amount of heat to create a plasma field-a hundred million degrees Fahrenheit, ten times hotter-than the sun. The heat only lasted for a tiny fraction of a second, but it was still devastating to ordinary manmade materials. Further, cooling the sphere or magnetrons was not an option-the only way to do away with the heat was to build the heat up enough to create a plasma field, at which instant it would cool to safe limits and the plasma field would disappear. Even if the creation of the plasma fields were pulsed, excess heat eventually built up to the point where even the strongest materials would begin to corrode and weaken.

  "What's the pulse interval looking like?"

  "The optimum safe range is between ten and twenty-five milliseconds," Kelsey replied, "but I only get a yield of point four one megawatts-almost half the level of the chemical laser we're replacing. Not good." Kelsey had been experimenting with trying to vary the spacing between plasma pulses. Spacing the pulses out farther resulted in manageable levels of heat but decreased the power available to the laser generators. "If I can go to five to ten milliseconds I can get to one megawatt of power. I'm shooting for one millisecond-then I can beat TRW's chemical laser output by twenty-five percent. But at that power level, I can get maybe ten ten-second shots off before the magnetrons let go."

  "Letting go" was a nice way of saying "exploding." The magnetrons in the confinement chamber served two purposes: they squeezed the plasma energy down to a smaller size to increase the power of the plasma field, and it then channeled the plasma stream into the laser generator. The magnetrons signaled imminent failure by vibrating rapidly as the magnetic material began to disintegrate molecularly and the magnetic fields began alternately attracting, then repelling one another at incredible speed. If the magnetrons failed and the plasma reaction wasn't stopped in time, the plasma field would grow uncontrollably, unleashing one hundred million degrees of destruction on anything within one or two miles.

  Building two smaller confinement chambers instead of one large one was an option, but there wasn't enough room for two of the right size in the B-52's fuselage; besides, Jon's and Kelsey's initial computations suggested that one large confinement chamber would do the trick, so they went for it, and now it would take weeks, maybe months, to redesign everything for two chambers.

  "I don't think we have any choice-we drop back ten, punt, and go for two confinement chambers," Jon said. "We need to build a little more safety into the system too, or else we can't market to the Pentagon. We need to get more than thirty shots and we need at least one point five megawatts, preferably two megawatts."

  "I know I can do it," Kelsey said. "By varying the time between plasma pulses, making bigger magnetrons, increasing the power to the magnetrons, adding more laser generators, and perhaps redesigning the oscillator, I think we can get one point five megawatts out of this system with a good margin of safety. Those changes would be simpler than tearing everything apart and redoing it with two smaller confinement chambers."

  "Frankly, Kels, we make more of a splash with a twomegawatt system even if we only get ten to twelve safe shots out of it," Jon said. "It's not important now-tuning up an unworkable system is a mental exercise, not a business one. We'll redesign the system for two confinement chambers." He squeezed her shoulders appreciatively. "You've done an extraordinary job, young lady. You've designed and built a powerful, sophisticated laser pumping system that's never been tried before, and in record time. It's got some bugs, but we've actually fielded a working system. You should be proud of that. Let's let the concept engineers work on the new drawings and take a break from this one for now."

  "Okay, Jon," Kelsey said.

  Jon Masters nodded, winked at Cheryl, then headed for the door, fully expecting Kelsey to follow him, even holding his hand as she sometimes did. But Jon was out the door before he realized that Kelsey had not followed him-had, in fact, not even gotten up out of her chair.

  He was about to go back inside and ask her-no, order her-to get up and go home. But then Cheryl reached over and, instead of taking her
daughter out of there or trying to convince her that she needed her sleep, started to massage her daughter's little shoulders.

  Who was abusing whom here? Jon asked himself. Did Cheryl want the best for her daughter, or was she mostly interested in making sure she was happy-and what in heck was the difference? Jon wasn't a parent-he could never know the answer to that question. The closest he came to family had been Paul and Patrick McLanahanone was dead, the other an emotional wreck.

  Best to just get out of there and let them have their time together, Jon thought. Cheryl obviously treasured even these little moments, as long as they could be togethereven if it was at the control terminal of a fifty-milliondollar laser.

  PRESIDENT ANWAR SADAT UNITY

  STADIUM, CAIRO EGYPT

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER

  "My brothers and sisters, may God bless and protect you, and may He grant all of us everlasting peace and happiness," Egyptian president Susan Bailey Salaam began. The military memorial service for the slain, injured, and missing of Mersa Matruh had concluded, and then came the political rally and the speeches. Last to step up to the dais was the president herself, making her first political speech since taking office. The cheering was deafening: It rattled seats, made the flags high atop the rim of the stadium flut-

  ter, and even caused car alarms in the parking lot outside to gooff.

  "We are here to pray for the victims of the terrible tragedy that claimed so many lives," Susan went on. "I pledge to you, on the memory of my beloved husband, to work tirelessly to bring to justice those that perpetrated that horrible deed. They will be brought before the people of Egypt, and they will feel our wrath-this I guarantee you.

  "But we are here not just for vengeance or retribution, but to profess our strength and unity in the eyes of God and to everyone in the world," Salaam went on. "None may challenge us. None may stay our hands or our voices, because God is on the side of the believers, and he will defend and protect those who stand for justice and peace."