Weapons of choice

"Sir, the captain regrets that he'll be delayed somewhat, though he hopes to be along shortly. The number three catapult is acting up again. Chandler has gone down to the flight deck to personally kick its butt and curse up a storm."

Kolhammer smiled at the image. The Clinton's CO had a notoriously combustible temper. It was distinctly possible he was doing just what Judge had suggested. But Kolhammer wasn't about to second-guess the carrier's captain. He was already too deeply mired in the political swamp to which Duffy had alluded during their interview. Indeed, a good part of each day was eaten up balancing the competing interests and agendas of the disparate forces under his command.

The Australians and the French, for instance, maintained an icy reserve with each other at best. This was due to the decision of France's new National Front government to renew and expand their nuclear test program in the Pacific. The relationship between the two governments had deteriorated so far that ambassadors had been recalled and billions of dollars' worth of trade sanctions were being declared. As professional as both navies were under normal circumstances, such a climate wasn't conducive to joint operations.

Meanwhile the Malaysian government had flip-flopped on three separate occasions, first committing to the Multinational Force, then withdrawing, then recommitting, and so on. Kolhammer had twice personally flown to Kuala Lumpur to seek assurance from the country's defense minister that Malaysia would meet its treaty obligations, only to land back on the Clinton to the news that they would do nothing of the sort.

And of course, there were the Indonesians. If his feuding allies and the feckless Malays were a pain in the ass, the Indonesians were a situation screaming out for radical butt surgery. He had them out of sight and out of mind for the moment, running submarine drills to the north. But he was going to have to bring them back into the fold sometime soon. The State Department weenies were insistent.

Kolhammer actually envied Guy Chandler for having gremlins in the number three catapult. If only his problems could be that simple.

"Right then, Commander," he said. "What do you have for me today?"

Judge consulted his flexipad with an apologetic air. "How'd you feel about a quick trip to the exotic and mysterious city of Kuala Lumpur, Admiral?"

"Oh, jeez," Kolhammer sighed.

Rosanna Natoli's eyes lit up as her friend reappeared at the door of the Clinton's Media Center.

"How'd it go with the Hammer?" she asked, using their favorite name for the fleet commander. It was not entirely respectful.

The New York Times feature writer rolled her eyes and replied in her best Sergeant Schulz, "I know nuffink! Naaarrffink!"

Natoli snorted. "And the mystery ship?"

Duffy shrugged. "Some corporate gig gone wrong. 'Seabed mapping,' he said. It was strange, though. Even though he made it seem routine, there was something about it that had him more excited than he was letting on. I tell you, boys and their toys. Speaking of which, you wanna go watch the bomb loaders work out? The cute ones are usually down in the gym about now."

"You fucking nympho."

JRV NAGOYA, 1233 HOURS, ZONE TIME: JANUARY 15, 2021

As the two reporters settled themselves onto exercise bikes in the Clinton's main gym, six senior Project researchers parked themselves in front of LG flatscreens and engaged the preliminary sequences required for a full-spectrum run on the Nagoya's Quad System. Manning Pope stared into the soft glow of the superthin display panel that lay directly in front of him. The screen was only 4mm thick, and it seemed as though the data was floating in space. Pope's head tilted slightly to one side as he tried to come at the dense matrix of symbols and numbers from a variety of different angles. After a few minutes of wagging this way and that, he pushed out his lower lip and turned to Murayama.

"At point-zero-one, I'm sure we can do this," he said, almost to himself.

Professor Murayama grunted an affirmation, but he wore an expression of concern. Still, if he had any doubts, he didn't voice them.

The Project was a seventy-nine-billion-dollar effort to field-test a number of basic assumptions about the feasibility of combining a heavy-ion collider, a quark-gluon plasma imploder, and a rotating photon splitter in order to transfer a nanonic explosive package from an originating point to a target destination without having to travel through the space that lay in between. It was, in essence, a teleporter. Just like in Star Trek, except that rather than moving hopelessly complex human beings across thousands of miles of space, it was designed to move a very small, very simple warhead directly into the mass of a selected target-such as the brain stem of Mullah Ibn Abbas.