anyway. They don’t belong to us, and I doubt Libya
:s.”
Toni appeared at the doorway. “What’s up?” Michaels nodded at Jay, and gave her a quick rundown. “Good work, Jay,” she said. “So what now?” – “Maybe somebody ought to take a trip to the ship and
around,” Michaels said. “All one has to do to get on board is show up at the
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heliport and flash a little credit to get a ride out to the floating casino,” Jay said. “Most of the patrons come from the U.S. Mainland, a few from Cuba and the other islands.”
“You going to ask the FBI to check it out?” Toni asked.
“They don’t have any jurisdiction there,” Michaels said. “And between you, me, and the hidden microphone in my lamp, I don’t trust the CIA as far as I can fly by waving my arms.”
“What are you saying here, Alex?”
“It’s the dead of winter. A little trip to the Caribbean to gamble and take in the tropical sun would be a nice break, don’t you think?”
“Me, me!” Jay said. “I’ll do it!”
“Nope,” Michaels said. He looked at Toni. “What do you think, Miz Michaels? You up for a little work out of town?”
The look on her face was priceless.
After Jay was gone, Toni said, “You’re serious.”
“Yes, ma’am. We need to send somebody there to get the lay of the place.”
“And you don’t want to do it.”
“No, my wife would kill me if I went off like that, leaving her at home with a toddler.”
“Seriously, Alex. Why me?”
“As I recall, the last time I tried to avoid sending you on an assignment because I was being overly protective, I got my ass handed to me. I learned my lesson.”
“Really.” Her voice was as dry as the Sahara.
“Well, okay, I don’t think it is going to be particularly dangerous, if you must know. You aren’t going to have to do anything risky, just walk around and get a feel for things, get the routine down. I don’t want you skulking into parts of the ship that are off-limits to the public, no trying to swipe computer codes, like that. I’ll have Jay come up with some holographs of the programmers he’s found, you can study them, so if you happen to see one
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lie you are there, fine, but the main thing is to gather
ion readily available.” |”For …T
jfTor when and if we might need it. I don’t know ex- Ay where this is going to lead, but let’s take a couple f hypotheticals and run with’them. Suppose Jay is right, that CyberNation is responsible for die attacks on the And they are being mounted from this ship in the ribbean. What can we do about it without proof? They : on die high seas, and our laws don’t apply. Sure, we send a Navy destroyer or missile cruiser down to a search-assuming we could convince the admiral nding, Secretary of the Navy, the Joint Chiefs, and : president to go for it, not that likely a proposition. If t’re wrong, international outcry would blow whoever responsible-that would be me-right out of a job. if we were right, every Third World country on the et would scream to high heaven about American im- lism and gun-boat diplomacy. The drawback to being pJuperppwer.” >”
fi?*No, but he might want to start thinking about ways to : onto a ship in the middle of the ocean.”
i the Bon Chance
i the lowest hold behind locked and guarded doors were EMP bombs. They wore wooden frames, made from
-by-four fir boards, and sat on big pallets, also made Lwood. They smelled faintly of something spicy, and ; and a seawater-and-oil odor drifted about in the damp Santos knew vaguely how they worked, these des, but they were not his thing, i He had made the mistake of asking. The explosives : practically peed himself as he talked happily about
lapping radiation pattern lobes and capacitors, coaxial and coaxial that, of hardened components and planes ‘ radiation.
Santos listened with half an ear, nodded, and murmured time to time, so that the bomb man believed, per- that he had some idea of what the man was talking out.
“We’re talking fifteen, twenty megajoules in ten- of a microsecond,” the man said, his face ec- ic with pleasure at having an audience. The man pointed at the nearest bomb, which looked to
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Santos like nothing so much as a torpedo in an old submarine movie. A little smaller and thinner, maybe. More pointed.
“This particular model uses PBX-9501. The armature is surrounded by a coil of heavy-gauge aluminum wire, that’s the FCG stator. The winding splits into halves, to increase induction. It’s cased in a heavy block of tightly wound Kevlar and carbon fiber, so it doesn’t blow apart before it generates the field-”
A bomb that didn ‘t blow things up. How odd.
Well, yes, it did explode and destroy itself, but its primary purpose was to fry sensitive components with a powerful electromagnetic pulse generated by the explosion. Very complicated. It seemed easier to him just to drop a blockbuster on the target and take it all out, but apparently magnetic radiation could go through concrete better than explosives, and besides, they didn’t want to lose the infrastructure altogether, they would need it themselves later.
Like a biological weapon that killed people, but left the buildings standing, an BMP bomb was designed to kill computers, but allow the people to remain. A bloodless weapon.
“Not as good as the Vircators,” the bomb man continued, “which are electron beam/anode devices that will vibrate at microwave frequencies. They can get forty gigs out of this design in the lab, but they are heavy and much more complicated-“