“Give me a break, nephew. I at least have to know the model of the car, and I’m not a follower of Japanese machinery.”
“If it’s a Murmoto, it’s probably a sport sedan.”
The jovial look on Percy’s face went dead serious. “To sum up, we’re looking at a compact nuclear device in the neighborhood of ten kilograms that’s undetectable inside a medium-sized sedan.”
“That can be primed and detonated from a great distance,” Pitt added.
“Unless the driver is suicidal, that goes without saying.”
“What size bomb are we thinking about?” asked Yaeger innocently.
“They can vary in shape and size from an oil barrel to a baseball,” answered Percy.
“A baseball,” Yaeger murmured incredulously. “But can one that small cause substantial destruction?”
Percy stared up at the ceiling as if seeing the devastation. “If the warhead was high yield, say around three kilotons, it could probably level the heart of Denver, Colorado, with huge conflagrations ignited by the explosion spreading far out into the suburbs.”
“The ultimate in car bombings,” said Yaeger. “Not a pretty thought.”
“A sickening possibility, but one that has to be faced as more third-world nations possess atomic weapons.” Percy gestured toward the empty display screen. “What do we use as a model to dissect?”
“My family’s eighty-nine Ford Taurus,” replied Yaeger. “As an experiment I inserted its entire parts manual into the computer’s intelligence. I can give you blown-up images of specific parts or the completed solid form.”
“A Taurus will make a good match-up,” Pitt agreed.
Yaeger’s fingers flew over the keyboard for several seconds, and then he sat back with his arms folded. An image appeared on the screen, a three-D rendering in vivid color. Another command by Yaeger and a metallic burgundy red Ford Taurus four-door sedan revolved on different angles as if on a turntable that went from horizontal to vertical.
“Can you take us inside?” asked Pitt.
“Entering,” Yaeger acknowledged. A touch of a button and they seemed to flow through solid metal into sectioned views of the interior chassis and body. Like ghosts floating through walls, they clearly viewed every welded seam, every nut and bolt. Yaeger took them inside the differential and up the driveshaft through the gears of the transmission into the heart of the engine.
“Astonishing,” Percy muttered admiringly. “Like flying through a generating plant. If only we’d had this contrivance back in forty-two. We could have ended both the European and Pacific theaters of war two years early.”
“Lucky for the Germans you didn’t have the bomb by nineteen forty-four,” Yaeger goaded Percy.
Percy gave him a stern stare for a moment and then turned his attention back to the image on the screen.
“See anything interesting?” Pitt put to him.
Percy tugged at his beard. “The transmission casing would make a good container.”
“No good. Can’t be in the engine or drivetrain. The car must be capable of being driven normally.
“That eliminates a gutted battery or radiator,” said Yaeger. “Maybe the shock absorbers.”
Percy gave a brief shake of his head. “Okay for a plastic explosive pipe bomb but too narrow a diameter for a nuclear device.”
They studied the cutaway image silently for the next few minutes as Yaeger’s keyboard skills took them on a journey through an automobile few people ever experience. Axle and bearing assemblies, brake system, starter motor, and alternator, all were probed and rejected.
“We’re down to the optional accessories,” said Yaeger.
Pitt yawned and stretched. Despite his concentration, he could hardly keep his eyes open. “Any chance of it being in the heating unit?”
“Configuration isn’t right,” replied Percy. “The windshield washer bottle?”
Yaeger shook his head. “Too obvious.”
Suddenly Pitt stiffened. “The air conditioner!” he burst out. “The compressor in the air conditioner.”
Yaeger quickly programmed the computer to illustrate an interior view. “The car can be driven, and no customs inspector would waste two hours dismantling the compressor to see why it didn’t put out cold air.”
“Remove the guts and you’ve got an ideal casing to hold a bomb,” Pitt said, examining the computer image. “What do you think, Percy?”
“The condenser coils could be altered to include a receiving unit to prime and detonate,” Percy confirmed. “A neat package, a very neat package. More than enough volume to house a device capable of blasting a large area. Nice work, gentlemen, I think we’ve solved the mystery.”
Pitt walked over to an unoccupied desk and picked up the phone. He dialed the safe-line number given out by Kern at the MAIT team briefing. When a voice answered on the other end, he said, “This is Mr. Stutz. Please tell Mr. Lincoln the problem lies in his car’s air conditioner. Goodbye.”
Percy gave Pitt a humorous look. “You really know how to stick it to people, don’t you?”
“I do what I can.”
Yaeger sat gazing at the interior of the compressor he’d enlarged on the display screen. “There’s a fly in the soup,” he said quietly.
“What?” asked Percy. “What is that?”
“So we piss Japan off and they punch out our lights. They can’t eliminate all of our defenses, especially our nuclear submarines. Our retaliation force would disintegrate their entire island chain. If you want my opinion, I think this thing is unfeasible and suicidal. It’s one big bluff.”
“There’s one small problem with your theory,” Percy said, smiling patiently at Yaeger. “The Japanese have outfoxed the best intelligence brains in the business and caught the world powers in their Achilles’ heel. From their viewpoint the consequences are not all that catastrophic. We contracted with the Japanese to help research the strategic defense system for the destruction of incoming missile warheads. While our leaders wrote it off as too costly and unworkable, they went ahead with their usual hightech proficiency and perfected a working system.”
“Are you saying they’re invulnerable?” asked Yaeger in a shocked voice.
Percy shook his head. “Not yet. But give them another two years and they’ll have a working in-place ‘Star Wars’ system, and we won’t.”
24
Behind closed doors in the Capitol building a select subcommittee was meeting to investigate and evaluate Japanese cultural and economic impact upon the United States. The fancy words were a nice way of saying that certain members of Congress were mad as hornets over what they perceived as a United States held hostage by the ever tightening screws of Japanese capital.
Ichiro Tsuboi, chief director of Kanoya Securities, the largest security company in the world, sat at a table below the long, curved counterlike desk in front of the congressional committee. He was flanked by four of his chief advisers, who irritated the committee members with their jabbering consultations before Tsuboi answered each question.
Tsuboi did not appear as a financial giant who led a securities company that had enough capital to swallow Paine Webber, Charles Schwab, Merrill Lynch, and the rest of Wall Street’s honored brokerage houses without so much as a burp. He had, in fact, already purchased heavy interest in several of them. His body was short and slender, and he had a face that some likened to that of a jolly proprietor of a geisha house.
Tsuboi’s looks were deceiving. He could easily hold his own against a protectionist Congress with fire in their eyes. His competitors in Japan and abroad hated and feared him with reasons bred from experience. Tsuboi was as ruthless as he was shrewd. His canny financial manipulations had elevated him to the level of a cult figure whose contempt for America and the European nations was hardly a well-guarded secret. Wall Street’s cleverest investment brokers and corporate raiders were pigeons next to the guru of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Almost single-handedly he possessed the power to knock the props from under the American economy.
