Jack Du Brul - Vulcan's forge

“Takamora went to Ohnishi’s mansion last night, but has not left as of an hour ago. We assume that they are working together on this coup attempt. As near as we can figure, Takamora will be the front man, given his popularity in the islands, while Ohnishi plays the role of king-maker.”

“What have you got, Tom?”

Morrison cleared his throat. “Well, sir, I’ve been in contact with the base commander at Pearl. He reports that there’s a fairly good-sized mob, maybe three hundred or so, on MacArthur Boulevard, just outside the base’s main entrance. They don’t appear to be armed, but he also reports that the National Guard, which was called out a few hours ago, seems to be part of the mob.

“I had some records pulled from the Pentagon files on Hawaiian National Guard enlistments. In the past couple of years a disproportionate number of applications have been rejected, nearly all white, black, and hispanic. In the past three years, eighty-six percent of the new members of the National Guard are of Japanese ancestry. Given the situation, I’d say Takamora has built himself a private army right under our noses.”

“Have you been working on some options in case they do try to pull this off?” The President’s cool blue eyes scanned the room, waiting for responses.

“Well,” Admiral Morrison started after a pause, “we have the carrier Kitty Hawk and the amphibious assault ship Inchon on station, well within striking distance of Hawaii. Pearl Harbor is on full alert, although they’re bottled up per your order. If Ohnishi tries to take the islands by force, we can just as easily take them back again. His mobs and guard troops can’t stand up to what we can throw at them.”

“Ordering our troops to fire on American citizens is not an option.” Anguish etched the President’s handsome features. “Goddamn it. I control the best trained and best equipped fighting machine ever built and it’s fucking useless to me.”

The men seated around the office watched the President’s pain stoically, each man thankful that they did not sit behind that desk.

Admiral Morrison cleared his throat again. “A precise surgical air strike against Ohnishi’s house would neutralize the problem. Cut off the head and the snake dies, so to speak.”

“How do I explain that to the people of Hawaii? They revere him. Christ, he donates something like twenty million dollars a year to Hawaiian charities. If we killed him, we’d touch off a grassroots revolution.”

“What about a commando raid of some sort?” Paul Barnes suggested. “And then tell the people about the Russian involvement. Make a clean breast of it and put Ohnishi on trial.”

Henna gave the answer to that. “Our intelligence reports Ohnishi’s house is heavily guarded. A raid would turn into a pitched battle. The furor over something like that would be ten times worse than the Waco fiasco back in 1993. I doubt the administration could survive, given the current polls. No offense, sir.”

“None taken,” the President said gloomily.

For the next hour, the men in the Oval Office batted around ideas, but each option they debated was rejected. All of them ended with the same result, the end of the administration.

“Maybe that is the only way,” the President mused.

The intercom buzzed and Joy Craig announced that Mercer had finally arrived, with a guest.

When Mercer introduced the stooped Dr. Abraham Jacobs, the President shot a brutal glare at Barnes, and Henna laughed delightedly.

“Dr. Mercer, when your contract’s up at the USGS, the FBI would love to have you.”

“I just can’t see myself as one of your fair-haired boys, Mr. Henna. I don’t take orders very well.”

“Dr. Jacobs, have you been told anything?” the President interrupted.

Jacobs, still a little stunned by the men in the room, merely nodded.

Seeing his old teacher’s discomfort, Mercer came to the rescue. “I told him that he was needed here because of the paper he presented to the CIA a few years ago.”

“Yes, that is correct.” Jacobs had found his voice, but sweat still gleamed on his wide bald head.

“Would you care to elaborate on that paper?” the President prompted.

After a preamble of coughs, throat clearing, and mumbles, Jacobs began. “Eight years ago, I was invited by the White Sands Testing Center to do some analysis on mineral samples from their 1946 Bikini tests. The samples had lain neglected in an old storage shed that was being demolished, so the White Sands people contacted a number of independent researchers across the country. They had something like eighteen thousand mineral samples in that shed, dating back to the early 1940s.” Jacobs’s voice was now sure and firm, confident of his subject.

“Of the groups of samples I agreed to assay for them, one was a collection of rocks, about twelve pounds’ worth, recovered from the seafloor around Bikini Atoll after the second test, the one where the bomb was detonated underwater. After some initial work, my interest was piqued and I requested all the data from the original tests conducted on soil, rock, and water samples collected from Bikini in 1946. For the next few months I researched twelve thousand pages of documents.

“After this, I realized only one small sample had any potential value, a two-pound chunk of rock taken directly from the epicenter of the explosion. It had been a ballast stone from the LSM-60, the ship under which the bomb was suspended. It was truly a miracle that the rock wasn’t atomized by the blast. Or so I thought.”

That phrase made the men in the room lean a little further forward in their seats.

“The ballast rock consisted mostly of vanadium ore, a surprising fact since vanadium is mainly found in North and South America and in parts of Africa. How it got to be ballast on a ship in the Pacific is one of those bizarre quirks of war, I suppose.

“Anyway, for those who don’t know, vanadium is used to strengthen steel for use in precision machine tools and other high-stress jobs, so it is very tough. That might have explained why it hadn’t vaporized, but it didn’t seem likely. I crushed the sample and ran it through a spectrometer to see what other elements occurred in the rock.

“The standard stuff, like mica, I discounted, but I found something interesting. Bonded to the vanadium were traces of a metal alloy. At first, I thought the metal was pure vanadium, extracted from the ore because of the heat of the explosion. But when I tested my theory, I found I couldn’t have been more wrong.

“The metal was something completely new. Something I couldn’t explain. I crushed the rest of the samples given to me by White Sands and found even more of this new metal, about twenty grams in all. Not very much, but enough to continue my research.

“Have any of you gentlemen ever heard of invar?”

Mercer was the only person in the room not to reply with a blank stare. “Yes, it’s an alloy of thirty-six percent nickel, traces of manganese, silicon, and carbon, and the rest is iron.”

“A-plus to my star student. It was developed by Nobel Prize-winner Charles Guillaume. Its principle characteristic is a minimal heat expansion, about seven ten-millionths of an inch per degree Fahrenheit of temperature increase. The incredible temperature of the blast, one hundred thousand degrees or more, made me think of invar during my tests, and I wondered if the two metals had similar properties. I heated my samples. At seven thousand degrees the metal didn’t expand at all, and at twelve thousand the change was measured in angstroms.”

The technical language was beginning to lose Jacobs’s audience, but he seemed not to notice.

“I continued applying heat, but I never could find the metal’s melting point.”