Warren Murphy - Rain of Terror

"I'll be right over," said General Martin S. Leiber. General Leiber was allowed through the Andrews gates only after he shouted down the guards. They tried to tell him the base had been declared off limits except to cleared personnel.

"I know, you noncommissioned jerk," Leiber shouted, flashing his Pentagon ID. "I'm the man who ordered it." They waved him through.

General Leiber drove to the hangar. He hadn't been there before. It was simple prudence. No way was he going near that thing. It might go off. But the major had assured him the device was no longer a threat. On the other hand, the major was stupid enough to raise his bid and then lay down a royal flush in the face of a superior officer. A man that foolhardy was capable of any imbecility.

As he was let in through a side door, the general thought the major had just better be correct. If anything happened to him, the President would be stuck underground for a long, long time.

Inside the cavernous hangar, light was furnished by banks of fluorescent tubes. It was hot. At one end, the orange glow of the kilns flared angrily. They were surrounded by an assortment of heavy anvils. Tools lay on the concrete floor. But there was no sign of the blacksmiths.

Major Cheek came running up. He was in his shirtsleeves and sweating.

"Where are my blacksmiths?" General Leiber snapped. "I hope they're not goofing off. They cost the government plenty."

"I sent them to a secure area, General. Their job is done and I thought it was better that they not be privy to the evaluation process."

"Harumph. Good thinking. Now, let's have the poop on this thing."

"This way, General."

General Leiber followed as he unknotted his tie. "Blasted hot in here," he muttered.

"It takes a lot of heat to make iron malleable," the major said. "That's why your barbecue grills weren't enough. We needed extremely high temperatures."

"Blacksmiths on TV westerns always used stuff that looked like barbecue grills to me. How was I to know the difference?"

At the far end of the hangar there were no lights. Major Cheek started speaking as he began hitting switches, illuminating one section of the floor at a time.

"In a way, you were right, General," he said. "The bell was a good starting point. But even so, we would have had a hard time working from there. It was really superfluous."

As the general watched, piles of twisted metal came into view. Closest to him were simple jumbles of blackened slag. Beyond them were the unfused pieces. They lay about in neat groups. It reminded General Leiber of photos of the destroyed space shuttle Challenger after the pieces had been recovered and laid out for inspection. There were a lot of pieces. Leiber saw bent metal bars, strange constructs, and in a corner pile, huge round flat things that reminded him of impossibly large gears.

"As I said," the major went on, "when we assembled one of the propulsion units, it dawned on us what this thing was. But even then, I doubt if I would have recognized what we had if my son hadn't been into HO models."

"HO?" asked General Leiber clutching at his cigar for support. "My God, are we talking about hydrogen ordnance?"

"Why, no. I've never heard of hydrogen ordnance."

"Never mind," said Leiber. "I thought you said this thing was safe."

"It is. Now. Please come with me."

General Leiber followed the major through the aisles between the debris. Although many of the pieces had been restored from their impact-mangled states, they were not perfect. Exteriors were blackened and pitted and many of the pieces only approximated the original parts. They had been too badly compressed to be completely reconstructed.

"This is the heart of it," Major Cheek said, gesturing to a huge black cylinder set on a wooden frame. It lay open and half-melted at one end.

The general poked his head in. The open end was easily seven feet in diameter and very black both inside and out. It smelled of scorched metal--like an old cast-iron stove. He ran his fingers along the outer skin, which was still warm from being welded.

"From the pieces, we were able to reconstruct this portion."

"The fuel system?"

"You might say that, General."

"Then it is a missile."

"Uh, yes and no."

"Don't 'yes-and-no' me again. Out with it! It is or it isn't. "

"It's not a conventional missile. But it acted like one in flight. In other words, it was ballistic."

"That makes it a missile," General Leiber said decisively.

"No," said the major. "A missile is a fuel-propelled rocket. This is no such thing."

"No? Then how did it get to Washington? By slingshot?"

"That's the part of this I can't answer, General. We haven't a clue there."

The general stubbed his cigar into his mouth. He tilted his service cap off his lined forehead and his hands went on his hips.

"If you know what it is, you oughta be able to tell me what its motive power was."

"That I can tell you," the major said, patting the long drumlike cylinder affectionately. "They usually run on kerosene or coal."

The general blinked. "Say again."

"Kerosene or coal. That's the fuel. But the propulsion system is a by-product."

"What?"

"Steam."

"Steam." The general's cigar dropped to the floor, shedding sparks. "My God. Do you realize how serious this is? Steam. Every ratass little nation in the world possesses steam technology. If this is true, we could be facing a terrible new era of steam missiles."

"That's the bad news, General. Every nation on earth already possesses these devices."

"They do?"

"General, I don't quite know how to tell you this, but the object we dug out of that pit is a locomotive."

The general looked blank. "A what?" he asked quietly.

"A steam locomotive. See this wheeled section? It's part of the propulsion system."

The general looked. Beside the big cylinder was a distorted truck sitting low to the ground. It sat on heavy flanged wheels.

"Locomotive. As in choo-choo? As in the little engine that could? Are we talking about that kind of locomotive?"

"I'm afraid we are, sir."

"That's preposterous," the general sputtered.

"I agree."

"A steam locomotive runs on rails. It doesn't have a propulsion system."

"Not for flight, anyway."

"Steam locomotives don't have guidance systems."

"Exactly. And neither did this one."

"They don't have warheads."

"This one is perfectly harmless. Unless it fell on top of you."

"Then what the hell was it doing falling out of the sky if it was so goddamned harmless?"

"Well, had it landed another hundred yards to the north, it would have demolished the White House."

"That's a hell of a small target to take out for the throw weight involved. Only an imbecile would attempt such a thing. "

"I can't explain it."

"How the hell did it get airborne? You can at least explain that, can't you?"

"I wish I could. I have no idea. The front end is fused from reentery and the rear end, where you'd expect to find a propulsion system, is ... just the rear end of a locomotive."

"There's got to be something more. Something you've overlooked."

"There is one other phenomenon."

"Yes?"

"The individual pieces. As you can see, we've kept them well-separated. Watch what happens when I push them closer."

The general watched as the major walked over to an isolated fragment. With his shoe, he nudged the piece across the floor until it neared the wheeled truck. Suddenly the smaller fragment jumped across the concrete and hit the truck with a bang.

"Magnetic," the major said. "Every bit of it is magnetically charged."

"We knew that at Lafayette park. It was one of the first things we discovered."

"Highly magnetic. Unusually magnetic. It must have taken an incredible application of electricity to magnetize a five-hundred-ton locomotive."