Neutron Force. Don Pendleton

windows at the artificial horizon and impatiently waited. He desperately hoped that Brognola would have a different conclusion from the one that everybody in his cabinet had arrived at less than an hour ago.

      Lowering the last page, the big Fed inhaled deeply, then let the breath out slowly. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he whispered. There were no bruises on the corpses. None. The dead passengers were laid out in a neat row on steel tables. Their clothing had been removed, and the bright halogen lights revealed every detail of the broken and twisted bodies in unforgiving clarity. No bruising meant the people had been dead before the aircraft hit the ground.

      “When did the autopilot engage?” he asked, frowning.

      “According to the black box,” the President said, “somewhere over western Pennsylvania.”

      “Did the escorts report anything out of the ordinary in the vicinity?”

      “Nothing unusual was reported until the 747 failed to start making course corrections over New York state. After that, they tried for a radio contact, then did a flyby and finally got a visual of the dead bodies on the flight deck.”

      “And then what, sir?”

      “They followed the plane, trying to contact anybody on board via the flight deck radio, cell phones, air phones, e-mail, pagers, you name it. Strategic Air Command and NORAD were still trying when the aircraft crashed into an escarpment just outside the town of Bouctouche along the Richibucto River in New Brunswick, Canada.”

      Brognola suppressed a whistle. Pennsylvania to Canada was a long ride on autopilot. He checked the photographs of the bodies again. “Not much fire damage,” he noted thoughtfully. “The fuel tanks must have been bone dry.”

      “That’s hardly surprising, since the original destination was Boston,” the President said. “The aircraft was supposed to be dropping off the director of special projects to talk with me about a new weapon.”

      Brognola raised an eyebrow. “A neutron weapon?”

      “See for yourself,” the President said, lifting a slim laptop and passing it over.

      Raising the lid, Brognola saw the machine was ready to play. He hit Enter and the video file began. The screen showed three different sections of the 747, the people laughing, sleeping and playing cards. A handsome Secret Service agent was chatting with a female flight attendant, and apparently the redhead liked what he was saying. Sitting all by himself, a middle-aged man in a rumpled suit was typing on a laptop. That could be the leak right there, Brognola observed. Aside from that, everything seemed normal.

      But suddenly a flight attendant carrying a tray of sandwiches opened the hatch to the flight deck and fell dead. Almost immediately afterward, so did everybody else.

      Watching closely, Brognola studied the bodies, then tapped the fast-forward button and went through several hours. Nobody stirred. Then there came a whining sound that rapidly built in volume, everything shook, loose items went flying, arms and legs of the dead people flopping around loosely. Then there came a horrible crunching noise. The picture went wild, more shaking, bodies lying on the deck were tossed about like rag dolls. There was more noise, a flash of fire, a metallic thunder and then blackness.

      It was distasteful, but the big Fed ran the video one more time and turned the volume all the way up. The man rushing out of the lavatory seemed to be shouting something. But his back was turned away from the video camera, and the clatter of falling dishes garbled his words.

      “The natural assumption is that whomever did this got the itinerary wrong, and thought I was on board,” the President said, shifting in his chair.

      “But you suspect otherwise?” the big Fed asked.

      “Yes.”

      “I’ll assume the Secret Service and Homeland Security have ruled out food poisoning and nerve gas—no, skip that.” Brognola massaged a temple. Not even the best neurological agent could sweep an entire plane of people dead at the same time, along with the dogs in the hold. A massive electrical shock might do it, but there would have been visible arcing and sparks, plus small fires and a lot of charred flesh. The new air cameras hidden on commercial flights weren’t very good, but the ones on Air Force One were top-notch, absolutely the best available, and the digital video had been crystal-clear. He could even hear the engines in the background. Everything alive on VC-25 had been killed without any mark of violence. And that could only be accomplished by a neutron bomb.

      All too clearly, Brognola remembered reading about the weapons when he’d first taken the job with the Justice Department. A Dr. Cohen down at Oak Ridge had modified a nuclear bomb so that it would throw off a halo, a corona really, of neutrinos, ultrafast, subatomic particles. The blast of the bomb would destroy only six city blocks, it was pretty small. But the halo of neutrinos would radiate for a mile, killing every living thing it touched. Right down to the ants in the ground. Even microscopic dust mites died. Only plants weren’t affected. With a neutron bomb, an enemy could kill all of the people in a city, but leave the skyscrapers, factories and farms intact for their invading forces to seize.

      Brognola shook his head. A bomb that killed people, but not property. That was a thousand times worse than the dirtiest thermonuclear bomb ever made, because the neutron bomb had no downside. It let you capture the cities afterward. There was very little fallout from the quarter-kiloton ignition blast, and thus no downside to restrain the indiscriminate use of the weapon. There were countless international treaties banning the development of the doomsday weapon, and not one neutron bomb had ever been used in actual combat. Until today.

      Thoughtfully, Brognola tapped a button on the keyboard and played the video once again. He had seen death before many times, but somehow this felt unclean. The people were slain in their seats, without even knowing that they died. There was no flash of heat, no tingle, no…nothing. Everybody just keeled over in perfect unison.

      “Anything from the Watchdogs?” Brognola asked hopefully, playing the video again.

      “NORAD reports no thermonuclear explosions over the northern hemisphere, if that is what you mean.” The President sounded annoyed. “Or anywhere else, for that matter. And the halo effect of a neutron bomb has a limited range. Even without the uranium jacket. To reach a plane so low to the ground, the bomb would have had to be detonated within the atmosphere.”

      “Rather hard to disguise that.”

      “Absolutely.”

      “Yet these people must have been killed by a neutrino bombardment,” Brognola stated.

      “Yes.”

      “Only there was no explosion.”

      “Exactly.”

      Grudgingly, the big Fed was forced to agree with the President that the conclusion was horrifyingly clear. This was what the President had previously inferred about neutron weapons. For the first time in many years, Brognola felt his blood run cold. There would be no heat flash, noise, radiation, or anything else detectable. Just silent, invisible death. The ultimate stealth weapon.

      “So somebody has finally done it,” the Justice man muttered, crumpling the report in a fist, “found a way to build a neutron cannon.”

      “Unfortunately, that’s also my conclusion.” The President sighed, rubbing a hand across his face. “Some sort of a cannon, or gun, that can fire a focused beam of neutrinos, but without a nuclear explosion as a primer. How that can be accomplished is beyond anybody’s guess. My scientific advisers don’t even have a theory how the weapon could possibly work.”

      “So we check with other experts. Who is the top scientist in the field?”

      “Dr. Sayar Himar,” the President replied. “But he can’t help us with the matter, because he’s dead.”

      “And when did that happen?” Brognola asked, feeling that he already knew the answer.

      “Yesterday. Dr. Himar was on VC-25 riding as the guest of the director.”

      Brognola