The fine teeth of the whirling disk sliced through the aged aluminum of the airframe with the ease of a razor blade through a balsa-wood model glider. There were no sparks, no heated glow from friction. The metal was too soft and the water too icy. Support struts and bundled wiring cables were also efficiently severed. When the cut was finally completed fifty minutes later, Pitt extended the opposite manipulator. The wrist on this one was fitted with a large gripper assembly sprouting pincerlike fingers.
The gripper bit through the aluminum skin and into a structural bulkhead, the pincers closed, and the arm slowly raised up and back, ripping away a great piece of the aircraft’s side and roof. Pitt carefully swung the manipulator on a ninety-degree angle and very slowly lowered the torn wreckage into the silt without raising a blinding cloud of silt.
Now he had an opening measuring three by four meters. The Fat Man-type bomb, code-named Mother’s Breath, was clearly visible from the side, hanging securely and eerily from a large shackle and adjustable sway braces.
Pitt still had to carve his way through sections of the crawl tunnel that traveled above the bomb bay, connecting the cockpit with the waist-gunner compartment. Part of it had already been partially removed, as were the bomb-bay catwalks, so the immense bomb could be squeezed inside the bowels of the plane. He also had to cut away the guide rails that were installed to insure the bomb’s fins didn’t snag during the drop.
Again the operation went smoothly. The remaining barriers were soon dropped in a pile on top of the wreckage already sliced away. The next part of the bomb’s removal was the trickiest.
Mother’s Breath seemed festered with death and destruction. Nine feet in length and five feet in diameter, the dimensions given when it was built, it looked like a big fat ugly egg dyed in rust with boxed fins on one end and a zipper around its middle.
“Okay, I’m going for the bomb,” Pitt reported to Sandecker.
“You’ll have to use both manipulators to remove and transport it,” said Sandecker. “She weighed close to five tons by the old weight measurement.”
“I need one arm to cut away the shackle and sway braces.”
“The stress is too great for one manipulator. It can’t support the bomb without damage.”
“I’m aware of that, but I have to wait until after I sever the shackle cable before I can replace the cutting disk with a gripper. Only then do I dare attempt the lift.”
“Hold on,” Sandecker ordered. “I’ll check, and be right back to you.”
While he waited, Pitt put the cutting tool in place and clamped the gripper on the lifting eye beneath the shackle.
“Dirk?”
“Come in, Admiral.”
“Let the bomb drop.”
“Say again.”
“Cut through the shackle cables and let the bomb fall free. Mother’s Breath is an implosion-type bomb and could survive a hard shock.”
All Pitt saw as he stared at the horrific monstrosity dangling only a few meters away was the erupting fireball repeated constantly in documentary films.
“Are you there?” Sandecker inquired, the nervousness detectable in his voice.
“Is that a fact or a rumor?” Pitt came back.
“Historical fact.”
“If you hear a big underwater boom, you’ll know you spoiled my day.”
Pitt took a long breath, exhaled, unconsciously closed his eyes, and directed the cutting disk to slash the shackle cables. Half rusted through after nearly fifty years beneath the sea, the strands quickly parted under the onslaught of the disk’s teeth, and the great bomb fell onto the closed bomb-bay doors, the only explosion coming from the silt that had seeped in and accumulated.
For an eerie, lonely minute Pitt sat there numb, almost feeling the silence as he waited for the sediment to fade and the bomb to reappear.
“I didn’t hear a boom,” Sandecker notified him with infuriating calm.
“You will, Admiral,” Pitt said, catching up and corralling rational thought, “you will.”
70
HOPE WAS HANGING in and rising. Slightly less than two hours to go, and Big Ben was barreling over the seabed with Mother’s Breath securely gripped in the pincers of its manipulators. Like the final minutes of a ball game when the outcome and score are still in doubt, the tension inside the C-5 Galaxy and in the White House was becoming heavier as the operation approached its peak.
“He’s eighteen minutes ahead of schedule,” said Giordino softly, “and looking good.”
” ‘Like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread,’ ” Sandecker quoted absently.
Giordino looked up quizzically. “What was that, Admiral?”
“Coleridge.” Sandecker smiled apologetically. ” ‘The Ancient Mariner.’ I was thinking of Pitt down there, alone in the deep with millions of lives riding on his shoulders, centimeters away from instant cremation—”
“I should have been with him,” Giordino said bitterly.
“We all know you’d have locked him up if only you’d thought of it first.”
“True.” Giordino shrugged. “But I didn’t. And now he’s staring at death while I sit here like a store-window dummy.”
Sandecker gazed at the chart and the red line showing Pitt’s course across the seafloor to the B-29, and from there to the detonation site. “He’ll do it and come out alive,” he murmured. Dirk is not the kind of man to die easily.”
Masuji Koyama, Suma’s expert technician in defense detection, stood behind the operator of a surveillance radar display and pointed out a target to Yoshishu, Tsuboi, and Takeda Kurojima, who were grouped around him.
“A very large American Air Force transport,” he explained. “Computer enhancement shows it as a C-Five Galaxy, capable of carrying an extremely heavy payload for great distances.”
“You say it is acting most strangely?” said Yoshishu.
Koyama nodded. “It approached from the southeast along a course toward the American Air Force Base at Shimodate, an air traffic corridor used by their military aircraft that passes within seventy to a hundred kilometers of our island. While tracking it, we observed an object detach itself and fall into the ocean.”
“It dropped from the aircraft?”
“Yes.”
“Could you identify it?” asked Tsuboi.
Koyama shook his head. “All I can tell you is it appeared to fall slowly, as if attached to a parachute.”
“An underwater sensing device perhaps?” mused Kurojima, the Dragon Center’s chief director.
“A possibility, although it looked too large for a sonic sensor.”
“Most odd,” mused Yoshishu.
“Since then,” Koyama continued, “the aircraft has remained over the area in a circular holding pattern.”
Tsuboi looked at him. “How long?”
“Almost four hours.”
“Have you intercepted voice transmissions?”
“A few brief signals, but they were electronically garbled.”
“Spotter plane!” Koyama snapped as if seeing a revelation.
“What,” inquired Yoshishu, “is a spotter plane?”
“An aircraft with sophisticated detection and communications equipment,” Koyama explained. “They’re used as flying command centers to coordinate military assaults.”
“The President is a vicious liar!” Tsuboi hissed suddenly. “He laid a smoke screen and falsified his position to
