Warp Speed (20 page)

"Doesn't look like any helicopter I have ever seen," I replied.

"Yeah, I like Harriers. The VTOL capability makes them very useful like a helicopter, but still as effective as a fighter jet. Just check out how it lands in as small a space as a chopper can." Tabitha watched in approval of the pilot's skill.

The jet landed in a small clearing and two men crawled down from it. One of them was carrying a small duffle bag. The pilot confronted Tabitha.

"You Colonel Ames?"

"That's right, Captain. I thought I asked for a helicopter."

"Sorry ma'am. All the helicopters were ordered out when the tornadoes came through. There are none within twenty minutes of here. This Jump Jet came in just after the storms. We were fortunate to get it. It is a real mess out there." He pointed to the southeast.

The other man handed me a flight suit, a pair of socks, and a pair of combat boots. Then he handed the duffle bag to Tabitha, after he saluted her of course. Tabitha looked around and then stepped behind the truck.

"Gentlemen, please look the other way. Anson, get dressed quick."

I was still trying to tie my boots when Tabitha stepped out from behind the truck.

"Captain, I'll take your gear. Dr. Clemons will take the lieutenant's. Move it!" The two of them moved it.

"Sorry, Airman. I guess you won't get to go with us after all." I shook his hand.

"Good luck sir and ma'am," he said.

"You three men get in that truck and drive south. That is an order! Where are the batteries?" Tabitha asked.

"Sorry, ma'am. No time to find them. But, we did get a small generator fully fueled and the jumper cables. They are in the back seat," the lieutenant said.

"Anson, will that work?"

"Yeah, it should. We will probably have to reset the circuit breaker on it every time we fry a board though. Hope we have enough time." At least I thought it should work. There were no physical reasons why it shouldn't.

Tabitha saluted the three men and we were off. I climbed into the backseat and Tabitha climbed into the pilot's seat. She cycled the canopy as she brought the engines on line.

"Have you ever flown one of these things before?" I prayed that the answer was yes.

"Never. How hard can it be?" She laughed. "Relax, I have over a thousand hours in these things," she informed me as we lifted vertically and then started horizontally. "Oh and hold on," she said as we cleared the treetops and then she slammed me back into my seat with maximum forward thrust. Then we were on our way back to the crash site or should I say ground zero. Tabitha flew due east until she hit the tornado's track. Then she banked and followed the track north until it turned ninety degrees back west.

"The crash was right at the bend in the track," I told her over the headsets.

"I know." She brought the plane in facing west up the track and descended.

I saw something flicker in my peripheral vision. To the north, just beyond the creek there was something shiny. It looked like a small clearing. Maybe there was a house with a tin roof there. It could have been a fire watchtower. Once we were below the treeline I could no longer see it.

Tabitha brought us down quickly with a bit of a
thump
!

"Come on, we have about thirteen minutes," she announced. The canopy cycled up. Tabitha was on the ground looking back up at me. I worked the small generator out from between my legs and handed it over to her. I grabbed the cables and jumped to the ground. It was a longer drop than I had expected. I nearly did a faceplant in the sand. I caught myself and rolled. I stood up brushing myself off. Tabitha just giggled a little but said nothing.

We both threw our gear down by the plane and each took a side of the generator. Tabitha set a fast pace up the slight hill to the edge of the clearing where the probe was. I could hear no humming or buzzing. That worried me. The calculations we did for the DARPA program showed that the dumbbells go critical just as the frequency or the sound shifts too high for human ears to detect.

We popped into the clearing and there were already four men hard at work dismantling the probe. All of them wearing military gear and clothing and were armed to the gills. The ECC had stopped buzzing because there were large Van der Graaf generators sitting all around it. They were plugged into a battery supply. The strong static electric field must have frozen the Clemons Dumbbells' motion keeping them from going further critical. They still weren't drained or destroyed I assumed. Tabitha and I assumed that help had arrived that we were unaware of. We stepped closer to the probe and the leader of the four men turned toward us with his pistol in his hand.

Johnny Cache (my handyman and secretary not the singer) was there by the probe pointing a handgun at Tabitha and me. I looked at Tabitha. She looked back at me with the same confused look.

"Hello, Dr. Clemons," he said. "I didn't expect that you would come back. You have bigger balls than I thought." Two of the men finished disconnecting the warp field coil housing and lifted the subsection of the cylinder. They rolled it over a network of cabling and cargo straps that they had laid out on the ground. The shiny object I had seen in the clearing just north of the creek must have been a helicopter because it was now hovering over us. A set of cables lowered and the three men other than Johnny Cache connected it to the lowering cables. Johnny talked into his left wrist telling the helicopter to take it up.

"Johnny, what the hell are you doing here?" I asked him.

"I'm earning a living. I wish you hadn't come back, because I kind of like you. But now you will have to die here." He seemed sincerely apologetic.

"What are you doing with the probe components?" asked Tabitha.

"Well, Colonel, I'm selling them to the Chinese. They were going to pick up the whole thing in orbit once the Shuttle was destroyed, but somehow you two managed to bring it back to Earth. Now I'll have to figure out a way to deliver it to them. Of course, it will cost them more. The talk of a meteor crashing in Florida--buzzing all over the news--gave me the idea that this could be the probe. My hunch paid off. Fortunately, I was only an hour or so away by fast helicopter."

"Hunh?" I shook my head. "I don't get it." I also wondered where the good guys were. If Johnny could figure it out, why didn't Space Command?

"He blew up the shuttle." Tabitha pointed at Johnny.

"How could he have done that?" I asked nobody in particular. I was trying to decide how I was going to get that gun away from him.
Keep him talking
, I thought. Somewhere in the conversation, we could find a distraction. Bob had never taught me how to dodge bullets. I always hoped he would someday. I guess I would just have to wing it, if I got the chance.

Johnny's buddies, employees, or whatever the other three guys were didn't seem to be paying us any attention. They had moved on to removing parts of ECC number two.

"She's right, Dr. Clemons. Security at the Vehicle Assembly Building isn't so tight these days. I placed the explosives in the Shuttle over two weeks ago using your security badge. It wasn't easy to get that from you. You should sleep more. Of course the plan was for the shuttle to explode once you two had assembled the probe and gone back onboard the Shuttle."

"How did the bomb know when to explode? That's impossible," I said, still trying to keep him talking. Tabitha tried to edge slowly sideways toward him.

"Hold still, Colonel or I'll shoot you now," he said calmly. "Planting the explosive and setting it to start the timer after a seven-minute gee loading was easy. Just a simple accelerometer and some simple timing circuitry, nothing fancy required. Your unplanned EVA delayed the flight plan by nearly four hours, hence you were still in the middle of the EVA when the timer set off the explosives."

"Johnny, why are you doing this? The Chinese could shift the balance of global power using this technology. What about your family? Do you want them to grow up communists?" Tabitha said. Johnny laughed at her.

"Screw 'em all! I'm going to live the rest of my life on a beach surrounded by naked women. I've been waiting for one more big score, and this is it, baby! Who cares about the politics of the rest of the world? Let 'em get their own island." He touched his ear as if someone was talking to him. He held up his left wrist and said, "Okay, move out!" The three men left for the north clearing, each of them carrying probe components. Johnny shot the battery pack powering the Van der Graaf generators. It spewed acid on the ground as the generators wound down. The Clemons Dumbbells started whining loudly and at about the pitch of a referee's whistle. I could see occasional flashes of light coming from the interior of the damaged, ECC number one. I guessed that we had about six minutes, maybe less.

Johnny looked at the generator that we had brought up the hill. He fired a couple rounds into it. Fuel drained from the tank. I guess we should have been glad that it didn't explode. I looked to my left at Tabitha. She seemed calm. I shifted my weight so that my right leg was slightly in back. I knew if I made a move it would have to be like a sprinter out of the starting blocks and I wanted my strongest leg in back to push off with.

"I can't have you flying off and telling anybody about this, can I? It was nice meeting you two." He turned and raised the pistol toward Tabitha. I rushed him. I was one step further away from him than I needed to be. He fired a shot just as my right hand slammed into his right wrist. I gripped his wrist tightly and yanked his arm forward under my left armpit. Then I completed the move with a Jackie Chan style arm crawl. I quickly grabbed his arm with my left hand just above the elbow on the nerve center and pressure point there, and pulled him further toward me. I held his hand tightly under my left armpit as I let go of his wrist with my right hand, and then proceeded to karate chop (knife hand strike) Johnny Cache on the right side of his neck. His hand went limp from the blow to the neck and the gun fell to the ground. With my right hand, I pushed up on his chin and tried to sweep his feet with my right leg. The intent was to throw him to the ground, but Johnny Cache was obviously a pro and was having none of that.

Johnny grabbed my flight suit by the right shoulder and rolled his weight backward. He threw his legs out from under him as he twisted to his left. We both hit the ground hard staring each other eye to eye and on our sides. The next few seconds were a flurry of grabs, counter grabs, attempted leg wraps, and punches. Each of us was trying to get an advantage over the other as we grappled and rolled on the sand. I was able to get his left hand barred for a split second, which allowed me to get a punch into the side of his head and roll on top. Johnny rolled his head minimizing the damage. He must have allowed me to bar his left hand as a ruse, because I felt a searing pain on my right side. Then I saw a shiny glint from the corner of my eye--Johnny Cache had a knife!

I lunged as hard as I could forward and over his head. Judo-rolling to my feet, I faced Johnny, ready for his attack. He got to his feet a little slower and more cautiously. He smiled insanely as if he were enjoying this.

"Not bad, Doc. At least I'll have some fun out of killing you, after all!" he said.

I felt my right side with my left hand. I was bleeding but not bad. The wound was a slice not a puncture. It was nothing fifty or so stitches, some antibiotic ointment, and a few bandages wouldn't fix. I readied myself for a knife attack. Although Bob had never taught me how to dodge bullets, he had taught me seventeen different ways to defend against a knife. Ten of them are very painful to the attacker. The other seven are passive. I planned to use one of the painful techniques.

Johnny and I circled each other cautiously. This allowed me to survey the area. Tabitha was on the ground motionless. I thought she was still breathing, but it was hard to tell. Johnny's crew had already disappeared from the clearing and were on the way to their helicopter. It was just Johnny Cache and me.

Johnny held the knife hilt forward in his right hand. The blade pointed back toward his elbow. Obviously, Johnny had some military self-defense training in his life. I was guessing Special Forces. He shifted to a left side forward fighting stance with his fists high and his elbows out Muay Thai kickboxing style. I always loved to fight people using this style's fighting stance. The high elbows leaves the ribs wide open for a roundhouse kick. Of course, real Muay Thai fighters train from childhood getting kicked in the ribs. Their ribs are broken many times throughout their lives. As they are repeatedly broken, they get calcified and harder. Johnny looked American. I didn't believe he was a
real
Muay Thai fighter.

Johnny and I made several feints at each other attempting to bait the other into a bad move. Like I said, Johnny was a real pro. I decided that it was now or never. I kicked him low at the knee with my right leg. He picked up his knee and let his calf take the blow. Without setting my kick down I rechambered it and side kicked him just below the belly button. He moved backwards from the force of the kick so I kept coming at him. I sat down the side kick into a spin side kick followed by an inner crescent kick that was aimed for the hand with the knife in it.

I missed the knife! As I sat the kick down I knew that I had better get out of the way. Johnny lunged toward me with a left jab then a spin backfist, which was really a spin knife jab. I backed up as best I could. The knife blade whizzed by my face two inches in front of my eyes. Had I been two or three inches closer, the knife would've buried hilt deep into my temple and that would've been that.

The reality of the knife strike shook me slightly. I backed off a bit more and composed myself. I tested the waters with a couple of very quick jabs and knee high front kicks. Johnny slapped them away with ease and sliced at me a time or two. I picked up my left foot to feint a kick. Johnny didn't buy it. But when I faked a punch with my right I could have sold him swampland in the Everglades to go with it. He stepped in to slice at me thinking that I was going to commit to the right punch. I was trying an old tournament trick--called a dash punch--that I had used successfully a thousand times. I pulled back the punch and slipped to the left. Then, I hammer fisted his right wrist with my left hand as hard as I could and the knife fell free. I followed by rotating my body into a front stance to get the full force of my body weight into a right palm heel strike to the bridge of his nose. Grabbing the back of his hair with both hands, I yanked him forward, slamming his chest into my right knee and then threw him past me to the right as I stepped through and turned back to a right side fighting stance. I kicked the knife as far away from us as I could.