Brad Thor - The Athena Project

It had taken a while, but she had finally managed to convince Scot that he was better off without her. He wanted a family; children. Those things were just not in the picture for her. In fact, she really couldn’t see anything in her picture, which was precisely why she had said yes to Walsh.

Approaching the bomb, she removed her backpack and propped it up against a large rock. She could see the torn and misshapen bodies in the near distance and couldn’t tear her eyes away. What the hell had happened here? Her mind couldn’t make sense of it. Even Jack Walsh’s attempts to prepare her hadn’t come close to getting her ready for what she was looking at.

She realized she was standing there with her mouth agape, studying the horror in front of her. Finally, her eyes fell back down to the canister. That was why she was here. She needed to focus on that, not the bodies. She was here for what might be a bomb, and what might be her destiny.

As Tracy removed the equipment from her pack, she glanced at the bodies. She wondered if the bomb had something to do with what had happened to them. She felt her heart pick up speed as her mind asked if she was in store for the same fate.

Don’t think about it , she told herself. Focus.

Tracy studied the object in front of her as she assembled a portable Terahertz Radiation, or T-ray, scanner. The object sure looked like a bomb, but not some jihadist’s improvised explosive device. It looked military. Naylor had been smart not to touch it.

It was roughly the size and shape of a fire hydrant and was lying on its side. Made out of some sort of metal, it had been painted olive drab. Numbers or letters once stenciled upon it had been all but sanded away. Just seeing pictures of it, Tracy had sensed what Jack Walsh’s fear was and she had agreed with him. The device looked like the kind that could contain a small tactical nuke. But by the same token, so could a wheely bag at the airport. It wasn’t the housing that ultimately mattered, it was what was inside.

Firing up the T-ray scanner, she marveled at what a great piece of equipment it was. It allowed EOD techs something called “stand off” capability, meaning you could study a potential bomb from several meters away, often gathering helpful information before having to really get up close and personal. That information could save your life.

According to the scanner’s display screen, there was no radiation. That didn’t mean the device didn’t contain a nuke of some sort, it simply meant that at this distance, it didn’t appear to be leaking.

Tracy approached the device and did a slow 360 around it. At about 160 degrees in, the scanner alerted her to the presence of a substance known as PBX-9501. Not good.

PBX, or polymer-bonded explosive, was a highly explosive material used in several nuclear warhead configurations.

After finishing her turn around the device, she set the scanner down and ran her list of render-safe procedures through her mind.

She began her work by studying the device for any antihandling devices-a fancy term for boobytrap. While she wasn’t afraid to die, she wasn’t going to walk knowingly into a trap.

As she got down to business, she noticed how much cooler it was here than in the rest of the jungle. That was a good thing, as she tended to sweat pretty hard dismantling a weapon. The fact that this appeared to be a lot more than just your average explosive device was definitely upping the perspiration factor.

There were no wires protruding from the housing and as far as she could tell, there was nothing that had been placed beneath it. In fact, it looked like it had simply just landed there.

Taking a deep breath, she began the disassembly. It was a slow, very deliberate, very precise process. More than once, Tracy stopped, backed up, and second-guessed what she was doing, convinced she had forgotten something. Once bombed, twice shy , she joked to herself.

After twenty minutes, she was able to get the cover off, and she laid it carefully on the ground. Picking her scanner back up, she turned it on and swept the open mouth of the device. It hit for PBX, but not for radiation.

Tracy looked inside. Instead of a code-decoder unit attached to a firing unit and then a warhead, as she had expected, she discovered a long aluminum tube wrapped in copper wire. Attached to the end of it was some sort of transformer. There were several other exotic components she didn’t recognize.

She carefully removed the items and laid them out on a plastic drop cloth. Once she had finished, she told Walsh and the others that it was safe to come over. She also told herself that she could now really look at the bodies. The team joined her.

Though the sight was incredibly grotesque, Paxton studied each body with the cold detachment of a clinician, a scientist. Once her first examination was complete, she captured each corpse on video.

“What happened here?” Tracy asked.

“We don’t know,” Leslie replied.

She stared at the mangled corpses and body parts sticking out of the sheer rock. “Does this have something to do with what I just disassembled?”

“We’re just as much in the dark on this as you are.”

Tracy didn’t know whether to believe that or not. “Really?” she said. “I saw the way you looked at those bodies. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear you’d seen all this before.”

Tracy was nice enough, and Jack seemed to like her a lot, but she wasn’t authorized to be read in on what was going on here. Pointing at Naylor, Paxton said, “It was all in his report. He included photographs.”

There was something about the way she defended herself that Tracy found less than convincing. Before she could respond, though, Walsh motioned for her to come join him at the bomb.

“So what do we have?” he asked as she walked over and stood be-side him.

Tracy looked down at the various parts. “At first, I thought we were looking at something along the lines of a tactical nuke, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“If it was a nuke, where’s the warhead?”

Tracy shrugged. “That’s just it. There is none. In fact, I couldn’t find any explosives in it at all, just trace amounts picked up by the scanner.”

“Any indication of country of origin or who this might have belonged to?”

“I couldn’t find any discernible markings.”

“May I?” asked Leslie Paxton, who had tucked away her camera and was now looking at the bomb components.

“Be my guest,” said Tracy.

“So you thought this might be some kind of tactical nuke, just like I did,” stated Naylor.

“Yes,” she replied, putting her fingers up in the air to make quotation marks, “but there’s no ‘nuke’ to this device. It’s something else.”

“It certainly is,” said Leslie as she picked up the long aluminum tube wrapped in copper wire. “This piece here is called a flux compression generator.”

“What is it?”

“It creates something that has the potential to be more horrifying than the Black Death, more costly in lives than any war we’ve ever fought, and so financially devastating it could make Hurricane Katrina look like a handful of change lost under a couch cushion.”

With the rest of the team staring at her, she clarified her remarks. “You’re looking at a crude electromagnetic pulse weapon.”

Basically,” said Paxton, “electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, is an electromagnetic shockwave.”