“I have to say it, Colonel, it looks good.” Martin said, not looking up from his computer. The colonel had come to join them. They were behind schedule, the need to ship the advanced material components from North Dakota, and to do so discreetly, was hampering their efforts. But today was hopefully going to be a good day.
“Give me the details, Martin, if you don’t mind.” asked the colonel, looking over Martin’s shoulder at the screen.
“Well, Colonel, we have locked in the shell casing and I have been scanning it with the ultrasound for the last four hours. We have two small air gaps which I need to fix, but with minor adjustments I am confident we have our design.”
“And we can use the existing outer casing?”
Jack spoke up, “Just as you see it, Colonel, we have managed to use the outer casing and the standard heat shielding from the original missile armor. All we needed to do was change the mounting slightly to account for the sandwich of superconductor between them.”
Barrett nodded. They were close, but he had to balance the need for expediency with the need for accuracy. He needed to know if it worked. Screw it, he thought.
“Captain, Doctor, time to check if this thing works. I know we’ve checked the superconductor against the laser before, but I need to know this structure will work under pressure.” he looked at them both; Jack seemed skeptical, but Martin was grinning. Barrett prompted them, “Well, gentlemen?”
They sprang into action. OK, the man wants to destroy $200,000 of titanium, who were they to argue.
Both the modified missile casing and their deuterium fluoride laser were ungainly devices, but they soon had them facing off against each other, locked in place, the big chemical laser powering up.
“Are we ready, gentlemen?” said Martin, as they all donned their dark glasses and arranged themselves behind the mobile, polarized Plexiglas shielding, itself thoroughly out of sight of the actual laser.
“Ready.” said Captain Toranssen.
“OK,” said Martin, “activating laser.” the humming from the already warm laser grew suddenly louder, and then its terrific green beam lanced at the big nose cone across the room. The twang and snap of the titanium casing came just fifteen seconds later, and the laser started to hammer at the thinner, impossibly black superconducting layer beneath.
“Just to reiterate, gentlemen,” said Martin over the loud thrum of the laser and the hiss and creak of the missile shielding heating up, “let’s remember that our target time is forty-five seconds under the much more powerful attack of the satellites’ defensive laser. That means it needs to be able to withstand this lesser attack for about six minutes.”
They went silent, their eyes moving in unison from the missile casing to the clock and back again like a parody of a tennis match.
Two minutes passed. They had a camera mounted behind the shielding. Not directly behind, because they had a large concrete block directly behind to absorb the laser attack once it broke through, but from its spot just to one side the small camera was still able to relay an image of the ceramic of the inner casing.
It was starting to glow, temperature sensors inside the casing showing the heat rising. The outer casing that was still intact was also starting to absorb the incredible heat of the superconducting layer, warping slightly and even starting to glow itself.
At three minutes, the metal of the outer casing was visibly orange and the large room they were in was starting to get noticeably hotter. Sweat was forming on the brows of the three men for two reasons as, at four minutes, the remaining outer metal casing started to slag, pieces liquefying and dropping to the floor to melt the concrete.
At five minutes, the airmen had shed their uniform jackets and all three of them were dripping with sweat. They had disabled any smoke detectors in the room weeks beforehand, and it was lucky that they had. The remains of the $200,000 titanium casing were now in a smoldering slagheap on the floor.
After what felt like days of endless heat, it happened in a snap. The superfine tethers of superconducting shielding started to fray ever so slightly as they reached and surpassed their maximum effective temperature. The slightest gap was all the laser needed, and in an instant the sliver of killing light broke through and hit the already superheated ceramic beneath and the whole structure shattered. As the laser at last reached the block behind the cone and started to burn it as well, Martin reached out and hit the kill switch and the beam died.
Five minutes forty-eight seconds. It was not what they had hoped for. It was within their range, but not as far into it as they had, in truth, hoped. But pipe dreams aside, it was functional and within parameters. It was time to clean up the mess. And it was time to go to full production.
* * *
Four hours later, a tired but satisfied Barrett Milton entered the apartment the navy had provided for him and slung his jacket on the floor. He noticed her smell first, recognizing it instantly, and his heart leapt.
“Pushpin?” he said, “How long have you been waiting?” he used his old nickname for her, for the way she had always been able to bring so much pressure to bear on such a small spot. He had always thought she should have been more annoyed by it than she had. That was before he had known what she truly did for a living.
Ayala came up from behind him, smiling softly, “Not long, cushion, not long.” He laughed softly, her retort reminding him that she had been the only person who had ever thought of him as soft. He turned to her. Their resistance to their mutual attraction had not lasted long after they had been reunited, but as he looked at her now he felt that his feelings were changing once more. He found that as he looked at her now he felt not only the passion that he had forgotten, and the love he had denied himself, he felt that thing he had lost when she had revealed her past to him.
He knew that now, embarked as they were on this seemingly suicidal venture, he trusted her once more, and as he took her in his arms and kissed her she knew it as well. She pulled back for a moment and looked into his eyes, savoring the sight. She had lied to him, endangered him and his career, she had even cheated on him when her duty called her to do so. She had done it all with a clear conscience, knowing the importance of her work, but she had never doubted the risk to their relationship, or the importance of her love for him. He had been the only luxury she had ever allowed herself.
Now, in this new crisis, she knew that all her previous missions may have been for nothing, and with this new perspective she saw that they had been on the same side all along. He, in turn, now knew that when faced with something important enough, he had found himself willing to betray all he had held dear in the name of something greater, just as she had.
He had lied, cheated, stolen, all for the greater good, and in doing so he had become that thing he had spurned in her. She saw that he had not so much forgiven her, as realized that he had nothing to forgive. Reading him as she always had, she realized that the pain she had caused him had come to an end and that they were one again, and she was overwhelmed with how much it meant to her.
He lifted her in his arms and she allowed herself to be a woman, his woman, forgetting all the training, the violence, the killing of her past. He carried her to bed. He was sweaty and smelly and alive. She laughed at how young she felt, how it reminded her of when they had met twenty years before. No more lies. For these precious moments she had no layers, only Ayala Zubaideh as she truly was. And she could think of no possible reason why she would ever lie to this man again.
They did not meet outside the Pentagon. Colonel Milton had been careful to enter by a different entrance and had also arrived several hours before Neal. Sitting in a bank of cubes reserved for visiting officers, he thought about how to play the crucial meeting he was about to attend. He was relying on Neal to bring the documentation they were going to rely on as proof, while for his part Barrett had also brought a sheaf of superconducting material to show their potential recruit.
Neal, arriving as he always did through the civilian checkpoint, went to his office and then pulled up the daily check-in sheet on his computer, locating the cube the colonel had been assigned for the day.
Seeing Neal approach, and noting that no one was in sight, the colonel did something he hadn’t done in years. Standing as he saw Neal approach, he took the man’s proffered hand and then put his other arm around his shoulder in a brief hug.
Neal was surprised, touched even, but he kept a serious face.
“Colonel,” he said, the moment seemingly passing, “it’s good to see you.”
“You too, Neal, you too, and I thought we said it was Barrett when no one was around.”
Neal laughed quietly, “Of course, Barrett.” It felt strange to say it, but somehow good as well, like calling a parent by their first name. Neal asked, “How are things at Hanscom?”
“Good, we have the shield design finalized and we have sent Martin to North Dakota to help Madeline with production. We are about a week behind schedule but I am hoping we can make a good deal of that up in deployment, we had some necessary contingency in that part of the schedule.” He smiled as he said this next part, “I understand Ayala attacked you with the antigen.”
They both laughed a little. Ayala had taken a bit more time and care before injecting Barrett than she had with the unsuspecting Neal, but only so she could enjoy winding him up about how much it was going to hurt. It had ended in a brief tussle when Barrett had tried to get the hypodermic gun off her. Not a good idea, it turned out. Moments later, he was face down on the floor with her astride his shoulders, her legs pinning him down as she rather ignominiously wrenched his pants down. The actual injection had been rather anticlimactic, in the end, but the, err, tussle that followed it wasn’t.
When they had gotten back to the task in hand, she had given him a hundred doses for him to administer as he saw fit. He would take a few flights to visit various friends and family across the country, and then he would make a long, looping trip through Mexico and South America as well, under the guise of visiting War Colleges in various allied countries, culminating with a brief but fortuitous speaking engagement at the Argentine Naval Academy. Diplomatic status would help him bring the small dose cases with him, liberal anaesthetizing beverages with colleagues in each location would help him administer them.
Moving past the spread of the antigen, Neal brought them back to the topic at hand, “So, how do you think we should go about this? Do you want to lead the conversation or should I?” asked Neal.
“I think it’s probably best that I kick it off, introduce what we are doing, and give some background. Then you can take the lead on the technical part, he will trust that more coming from you, and you are better at explaining it. After that …” the colonel looked blank for a moment. He didn’t really know how they were going to handle it if things did not go as planned. He knew what he would have to do, he knew that all too well, and that is why he had not wanted to have the meeting in the Pentagon. But he also knew that to ambush the man anywhere else would probably be just as risky and far harder to arrange in secrecy.
“OK, Barrett, we’ll go with that.” agreed Neal, “How about you let me start with a brief explanation of why I have brought you in as well, seeing as he isn’t expecting you to be there.”
Colonel Milton nodded, and they stood silent for a moment. Neal inhaled deeply then raised his eyebrows expectantly, “Well, Colonel, shall we?”
“Absolutely, Neal. I forget where the admiral’s office is, so why don’t you lead on?”
“Oh, please, Barrett, you think that I know my way around this rabbit warren?” they laughed.
“OK, I’ll get us to the navy STRATCOM section and we’ll go from there, how about that?”
Neal nodded and they set off.
As they arrived at the Naval STRATCOM section, Neal noticed that it was not the same section of the building as the one he had met Admiral Hamilton in after returning from India. His suspicions were further confirmed when an assistant directed him and the colonel to the admiral’s office and they arrived at a wholly different location than he had remembered from before.
“Colonel,” Neal said, taking Barrett’s arm to get him to stop before they went in, “should I be concerned that the last time I met with the admiral he was in a completely different section of the building?”
“He hasn’t changed jobs since then?”
“I don’t think you can go much higher than head of Fleet Operations.”
Barrett realized what had happened and shook his head, “I’ve heard of the general doing this too. Leave it to me, I’ll find out whether it is anything to be worried about.” and with that they turned and went into the admiral’s receiving area.
They didn’t have to wait long, and soon they were being ushered by one of the admiral’s aides into his large office.
“Wow, this is nice, Admiral,” said Neal, shaking the older man’s hand, “much bigger than the office we met in before.”
Admiral Hamilton smiled, not thrown by the comment, but clearly intrigued at the presence of an air force colonel in his office without a pre-call from the man’s supervising general.
“I was having this one redecorated when you last came by, you’ll have to excuse the loner they gave me.” said Tim Hamilton, now staring openly at the colonel, who went ahead and spoke.
“My apologies for being here unannounced, Admiral Hamilton. I’d like to request that you withhold judgment on that point until the meeting is over. After that, if you feel I have overstepped my bounds by coming to you, I assume you will contact General Pickler as you see fit.” The admiral’s eyebrows rose in surprise, but his face also betrayed a hint of impatience. He was not one for office intrigue.
Barrett noted this and went on, “I hope you’ll see soon why we did not supply an agenda for this briefing in advance.”
The admiral knew protocol demanded that he call the general before speaking further with the colonel, but he was not fool enough to ignore the tone of the decorated airman’s voice. Nor was he naïve enough to believe for a moment that General Pickler would immediately call him if a naval commander were to approach
him
in secret.