All Roberta could say, her voice cracked and dry, was, “It’s spotted.” Her dark eyes closed; she seemed to be asleep. Freeman stayed for a moment, gently taking her warm, flaccid wrist, and prayed for her and, if it be God’s will, help to catch those who had perpetrated the massacre.
When he emerged from the IC unit, security, a short, overweight woman, perspiring heavily, was warning Johnny Lee that she’d called the sheriff.
“You can come with us, ma’am,” Johnny Lee told her as the general emerged from the ICU. “We’ll take you to him.”
Lee uncuffed the doctor, who was now vigorously massaging his wrists. “You’re fucking fascists!” the doctor shouted at both men. The security woman was standing by, openmouthed.
“Get anything?” Johnny asked the general on their way out.
“It’s spotted,” Freeman told him. “That’s all she said.”
“One of the terrorists’ faces maybe,” Johnny ventured, “spotted with psoriasis?”
“Hmm — it’s possible.”
“You — fucking fascists!”
When they returned from the far end of the lake below Bayview to the DARPA base, the sheriff had mustered the day staff together: seven scientists and their seven technicians who worked on the DARPA “Flow-In-Flight” project. He was told that there were more scientific personnel involved in ARD — Acoustic Research Development — as it related to submarines, but the people Freeman was interested in were those who had been working on the latest deep-water-moored DARPA ALPHA barge and the hut where the terrorists had shot the night staff. They had been added to the Acoustic Research Development complex here only in the years since 2007, when more research money had been freed for homeland-defense-associated projects. The money became a flood following the terrorist attacks in which shoulder-fired anti-aircraft rockets had brought down three American aircraft since 9/11.
“Sorry for your loss,” Douglas Freeman told the visibly shaken chief scientist, a Professor Richard Moffat, head of the fourteen-person day shift. “But I need to know precisely what these scumbags stole.”
“A disk,” said Moffat, a man around Freeman’s age.
Though most of the day staff were dressed casually in jeans, like the doctor at the hospital, here in the open they were all wearing either heavy sweaters or Gore-Tex Windbreakers, the temperature having plummeted in the confluency of the Pacific Ocean front that had come barreling in from the northwest, slamming into a warmer Chinook wind driving northward into the Alberta badlands. It was getting cold. Moffat was the only one wearing a white lab coat, stained, it seemed to Freeman, with rust and grease, probably from working near the gantry and cranes of a second green-and-white-striped DARPA ALPHA barge where the staff had to haul in new large-scale test units from the deep, glacier-carved lake.
“I know it’s a disk,” Freeman told Moffat, “but is there anything more specific than ‘Flow-In-Flight’ written on it?”
Moffat was finding it difficult to focus, acutely aware that his laissez-faire attitude toward the security of his fellow scientists had been a disastrous mistake.
“Professor,” repeated Freeman impatiently, “is the disk labeled in any other way?”
Moffat was staring across the lake at the cold-looking mountains. Freeman knew that his SpecWar team had probably a half hour of reasonable weather before the churning gray clouds gave way to rain.
“Professor, I know it’s tough on you at the moment, but time’s of the essence here.”
“What — oh, sorry, General. The disk was simply labeled ‘DARPA ALPHA Flow-In-Flight.’”
“What kind of data were on the disk?”
Moffat had the zombie look of someone in shock. “That’s highly sensitive material, General.”
Freeman shook his head in disbelief. Murphy’s Law was on the loose. Hadn’t Eleanor Prenty gotten through to Moffat and cleared the general of any D.S.R. — document search restriction? Or perhaps Eleanor
“All right, now listen to me, Professor. I want you to focus. Your highly sensitive material has been stolen by terrorists, and my team is going to have to know exactly what to look for.” For a moment the chief scientist stared at Freeman as if he had no idea who the general was.
“We need to focus,” Freeman reiterated.
The professor’s eyes shifted from Freeman again out to the slate gray waters of the lake. “It’s a lot of diagrams and formulas, like so much technical literature. I don’t see how anyone without a degree in—”
“Doc!” cut in Freeman. “I’ve been sent by the president.”
“Yes.” He paused. “I’ve been told that.”
“So what’s on the fucking disk? Is there a diagram, something we can key onto should we see it?”
Moffat thought for a moment. “Doreen?” he called out, and a thin woman in her twenties, chestnut curls wreathing her face, walked over from the gaggle of DARPA ALPHA scientists who were talking to the FBI and DHS agents. Moffat introduced her as Dr. Wyman and told her what the general wanted, assuring her that Freeman was “cleared to the max.”
“Well,” she told the general, “we’ve been recording data from trials of a super-cavitating, that is, super- spinning, torpedo. These super torpedoes were originally pioneered by the Russians. One of them, a Shkval class, could run at two hundred miles an hour and was aboard the Russian
Freeman told her he remembered the
“It was because of the presence of this super-spin torpedo on board,” Doreen explained, “that the Russians refused offers of help from other countries to rescue the
Freeman was impressed, but Moffat’s downcast look was that of a man who knew his career was over unless his scientific brilliance could trump his appalling failure in security. He stared out at the lake again as Doreen asked him whether she could tell Freeman about “the Torshell.”
“Yes,” said Moffat softly.
Quietly, her face strained because even with her boss’s permission she was still reluctant to explain the enormity of what America had lost, Doreen explained the secret. “A Torshell,” she told him, “is a super-cavitating — that is, super-spinning — fifty-caliber torpedo-shaped rifle round that we’ve developed from our research on the super-cavitating torpedoes. We’ve drilled a wire-thin hole through the bullet. Think of the thin wire in one of those bag ties you pick up at the grocery store to twist-lock a plastic bag of vegetables or bread rolls, stuff like that.”
“Will this take long?” the general asked, glancing up at an increasingly morose sky and flicking up the leather cover of his watch.
“No,” Doreen said, “it won’t take long but you need to understand how it’s very new, this technology. Revolutionary, in fact.”
“Go on,” said Freeman, trying to contain the legendary impatience that had ironically also led to some of his greatest military breakthroughs.
“Well, as I said, because of the research here, we’ve been able to apply super-cavitating, super-spinning technology to what has been the usual fifty-caliber ammunition rounds. What we’ve done is drill into a tungsten- core bullet a nano-thin lining of incendiary chemicals. The bullet, as in the case of the much larger torpedo, cavitates or spins at super speed because a gas shoots out in front as the chemical inside morphs from a solid to a gas because of the heat from the torpedo’s, or in this case the bullet’s, propellant. This jet of gas shooting out the front forms a protective bubble around the bullet in air — or in water, in the case of the torpedo — and so the bullet or torpedo has next to no resistance.”
Freeman had understood five minutes ago. “You’ve developed a super-fast bullet.”
“Faster,” said Doreen, “than anything ever produced — except, of course, the speed of light.”
“How fast?”
“Well, the Russians, with their Shkval torpedo, have reached two hundred miles per hour in water. Slow compared to what we’ve been able to do. It’s largely a matter of who has the best computer-governed lathes. The tolerances are incredibly small.”
