Extinction Machine

Chapter Fifty-nine

The Hangar

Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn, New York

Sunday, October 20, 10:46 a.m.

While Bug labored to solve the problem with the jammer, Dr. William Hu shifted his focus back to the project he’d been working on for the last few days.

The microwave pulse pistol.

The lab was filled was smoke, and he engaged the blowers while his assistants cleared away the debris and erected a fresh stack of bricks. Currently the microwave pulse pistol was clamped to a cart and placed twenty feet from the target. At five, ten, and fifteen feet the destructive power of the MPP was appalling.

And delicious.

This was fun, this was his idea of science. Not that UFO bullshit Joe Ledger and that daffy broad in Maryland were trying to get him to believe. You could measure this, you could prove this. Who cared if someone stomped out a crop circle on the White House lawn? Those things could be faked.

But this—the guns—this was real science.

Hu grinned as he paced off twenty-five feet, then locked the cart’s wheels. The assistants patted the target—a wall of red bricks, cinder blocks, and a couple of big river rocks brought in from outside the Hangar.

His assistant, Melanie, clipped leads to various places on the gun and watched the meter of a small device she held.

“This is crazy, Doctor,” she said. “The meter still reads 94.189 percent after nine test fires in five minutes.”

“I know,” said Hu, “I love it.”

They grinned at each other like a couple of kids.

Hu turned and pulled his protective goggles into place. “Clear the firing line!”

Everyone moved behind thick Lucite shields.

“Firing,” he yelled and pulled the trigger.

Tok!

The wall of debris exploded.

“Outstanding,” cried Hu. “Absolutely outstanding. Melanie, is there any power drain?”

Melanie ran the meter again and shook her head. “Ninety-three point seven seven six percent.”

They tried five more distances, and only when they neared forty feet did the destructive force of the MPP begin to diminish. By sixty feet it had little effect.

They kept testing the gun. Against blocks of ice and sheets of metal, firing through glass, firing at sides of beef to determine the effect on tissue. The gun had been delivered to Hu late on Thursday and now it was Sunday. It had been fired a total of 607 times. On arrival at Hu’s lab the gun had a charge of 99.00034 percent. After all those firings, after all that destruction, it had a charge of 90.0957 percent.

Hu removed the clamps and picked up the pistol.

It was ugly in design, but beautiful to his eyes.

And those numbers. The range, the effect, the incredible amount of power held in reserve.

“Who made this thing?” asked Melanie. It was probably the hundredth time she or someone at the Hangar had asked that question. “Who could have made it?”

Hu shook his head. Over the last couple of days he had spoken discretely to several who were on the cutting edge of microwave technology and they told him that they were decades away from a man-portable microwave gun like this pistol. The current estimate was that to fire a gun like this you’d need a battery the size of a Jeep Cherokee. And yet when they’d dismantled the gun, all they found in the battery compartment was a piece of drab metal approximately the size of an old metal cigarette lighter. The metal had no discernible features, and the gun fired no matter which end of the battery was inserted first. Ledger had found a second battery in the pocket of one of the men who’d ambushed him this morning.

Then Melanie stuck a pin in Hu’s enthusiasm. She got a call, listened, frowned, hung up, and said, “That was Mitchell in metallurgy. He finished his analysis of the scrapings he did on the other battery.”

“And?”

“And he’s never seen anything like it. He looked at it under the electron microscope and it appears to be an alloy composed of two metals. It’s approximately twenty percent iridium, but the other metal is unknown.”

“Meaning that he hasn’t identified it yet?”

“No,” she said, “meaning that it is a metal currently unknown to science.”