“See, I didn’t feel a thing, did you?” he asked the hand of Jesus. “There’s something about that proton field, though. It sends those kung fu dudes into conniptions. At least I think it’s the proton charge. Well, whatever.” Jack heard the generator begin working, powered by the proton cell. He was using bursts of electricity to create electricity, but what the heck? It worked, didn’t it? And man, did it give him a lot of power to work with.
“Hey, you ready? I swear you never saw anything like this before.” Jack pressed the channel-up button. The huge framed triangle shuddered, crackled with electricity, then rose in a billow of desert dust. Jack hastily dragged on the plastic filtration mask he had clipped on his belt, and watched the airship rise. It blotted out the stars; it was acres big.
“Is that cool or is that cool?” Jack demanded. His eyes, as blue as the tropical ocean in a travel brochure, glinted with wild excitement. “Fetch, boy.”
He pressed Play, and the airship drifted away in virtual silence.
When he turned back to the drill, Jack found the hand of Jesus was buried in dust up to the cuticles.
“Oh, man, you missed it? Sorry about that.” He pushed off the sand until the hand was exposed again almost to the elbow, then Jack set up his laptop to monitor the progress of the Jack Fast’s Amazing Invisible Airship. Not that he had to do anything. The airship was already programmed to do the work all by itself. Like everything Jack Fast engineered, it worked perfectly.
After an hour, Jack got out the cooler to make some baloney sandwiches.
Chapter 17
The Object of Plausible Denial—OPD—lay under a rock.
It had fallen out of the sky when it shouldn’t have and hadn’t exploded when it should have. It bounced and skidded across the desert floor for 87.62 yards before becoming wedged under the big rock. The skid marks were erased by a brisk wind before they could be sighted from the air by the U.S. Air Force search planes. The Air Force devoted almost ten thousand man-hours to the search effort, but the device was never found.
There were two schools of thought on how to handle the loss of a device that dangerous.
One group wanted to warn the population, offer a reward for finding the device and create enhanced public safety through a high degree of awareness. The safety-first group was actually just one engineer with a defense contractor from Dallas, and before long he was persuaded to move to Iowa. He spent the remainder of his engineering career designing coin-operated laundry appliances—sophisticated laundry appliances, with lots of elaborate features.
The second group decided not to tell the public, not even tell that peanut fanner who was technically commander in chief at that time. Yeah, right, like that idiot peacenik could be expected to make a rational decision about a lost bomb. The best thing was to simply categorize the lost device as an OPD.
The device, once designated top secret, was now designated an Object of Plausible Denial, which meant its existence, was creatively erased in all Air Force paperwork. The engineers and officers who had sweated, and labored to create the device purged it from their memories. If you asked them what they were doing during that eighteen-month phase of their careers, they would tell you it had something to do with developing advanced, ultrastrong bungee cords for high-speed ground-to-air pickups. But the cords snapped a lot so the project was shelved.
Without evidence, it was easy to convince others and themselves that the device had never existed.
There was one man who was given the burden and responsibility of retaining the facts of the lost device, just in case this information would ever again be needed. Which it never would. Just a formality, really. The man was chosen for his security level and his youthfulness. He memorized all the data on the device, so when the data was destroyed the young officer was the only remaining source of data on the device. This was how the military did things. It was OPD SOP.
Decades later, the young officer was a retired old officer and even he had forgotten about the device. He had also forgotten about his wife, his dog and his ranch house in Houston—everything except the inside of the He’s Not Here Tavern.
Amazingly enough, the forgotten OPD was found again. It took minutes for Jack Fast’s airship, mounted with its stolen, top secret ordnance detector, to zero in on the OPD, where it had lain undiscovered under a rock since 1978.
This particular ordnance detector, ironically, had been stolen from the U.S. Department of Defense just a few months before and had just been reclassified as an OPD.
“Morons,” Jack Fast thought as he watched his laptop display. He had no idea what the thing under the rock was, but he knew he wanted it. He deployed the pincers, lowering the high-tensile cable until it grasped the one small corner of a bent tail fin that protruded from under the rock. The pincer closed with magnetic force that had the proton-driven generator turbines humming constantly. The airship ascended and the OPD emerged from its shelter for the first time in decades.
Minutes later, the airship deposited the device gently on a flat, empty patch of desert a hundred yards from the drill, then it rose again and began looking for more OPDs.
Jack wondered how many lost objects the military had lying around out there. Lots? He hoped there were lots.
Pretty soon, he knew the answer.
There were lots.
Chapter 18
Harold W. Smith knew many of the nation’s dirtiest secrets, and he had no compunction about revealing them if it served his purpose.
His purpose was to protect the constitutional democracy of the United States of America. He knew full well that most of these secrets had become known to him by blatantly violating the golden rules of the Constitution. It was more than an irony; it was Smith’s grim reality.
Sometimes, when he allowed himself to speculate on the possible alternatives, he shuddered to think what might have happened. Smith knew that almost any other man, put in his position, would have eventually been corrupted by it. It was too much power for a man to have.
So what would happen when Smith was gone? He was old, after all. Mark Smith was a dedicated young patriot who could surely handle the responsibility of directing CURE operations.
But Mark Howard was only human. Would he succumb? Would he be corrupted? It was almost unthinkable that he would. It was unrealistic to think that he wouldn’t.
Where did that leave Smith, when the time finally came that he could no longer handle the daily grind of running CURE? Would duty require him to erase CURE, to wipe the slate clean, so that no one could prove CURE had ever even existed?
Which brought Smith back to his current problem, which pertained to the Experimental Low-Altitude Organic Deactivation Device, Serial No. A002. It had been test-fired in White Sands years ago and was lost within seconds of its launch. Since it couldn’t find the device, the Air Force had decided to pretend it had never existed. It wasn’t the first time nor the last.
Smith had always monitored these devices when he could. A002 had a radioactive signature that couldn’t be traced from a distance until new spy satellites were orbited in the 1990s and new ground-based sensor systems were positioned throughout the White Sands Missile Test Range.
By then, nobody even remembered the lost A002, or its predecessor the A001, and the radioactive signature was too small to register on the security systems.
Harold W. Smith had fed the signature of the A002, and a thousand other ordnance specifications, into the immense network-monitoring systems that resided in the CURE mainframes, the Folcroft Four. You never knew when one of them might pop up out of nowhere.