Unpopular Science

“Aren’t you supposed to be in the basement?” Remo asked, suddenly alert. “There are a bunch of Secret Service outside the doors who’re plotting to break the door down and some of them have even started perspiring.”

“False alarm.” The President glared at Chiun. “I’ll stand them down.” But before the President lifted the second phone, Remo held a hand over it. Remo and Chiun were staring into the ceiling, as if listening to the rats in the White House attic. Then they looked at one another, frowning.

“What?”

“The alarm is no longer false,” Chiun stated, then twirled and slipped toward the window. The President jumped to his feet and by then he was alone.

Chapter 35

The eldest and only son of Jacob Fastbinder III stabilized the air pressure, then keyed open the door to Fast- binder’s new jet.

“You’re on your own from here, dudes!”

The first metal cylinder, which was tapered at both ends like a hand-stretched glass Christmas ornament, rolled obediently out of the custom-widened side door of the passenger compartment. The second cylinder got stuck on something.

“Hey, come on, you big tub of lard, get going!” Jack Fast yanked the stick left and right. He heard the cylinder collide with something inside the aircraft. “Oh, great! Did you bend another seat support? I’m gonna strip your gears. I’m losing my patience with you and it’s already down to eight degrees in here. Take this!” He turned the aircraft on its side.

The cylinder, much wider and shorter than the first cylinder, bonged against another seat but tumbled out of the jet and started the journey to earth. The journey would take a long, long time as free falls go.

“Pops,” Jack radioed.

“Yes, Jack, are they on their way?”

“Yeah, Pops, but I think that fat tick-tocker bent the seats, just like in the tests. We need a better jet. I’m getting tired of replacing passenger seats in this little prissy thing. We need something with real bomb doors. Maybe the Canadians—”

“We’re not going to buy a bomber, Jack!”

“Aw, jeez, Pops!” Jack signed off and scowled into the stratosphere. “Fine. I’ll build my own dam airplane.”

The cylinders tumbled just seconds before righting themselves, and then they were ultra-aerodynamic, slipping through the thickening atmosphere in virtual silence. They were black, without signal lights, so they remained unseen. The coating of paint on the exterior allowed military scanning waves to slip over them as easily as the airstream. The ground control that was constantly monitoring the skies over Washington, D.C., never even knew the oversize Christmas ornaments were above them.

The Fastbinder jet never entered restricted airspace, simply followed its flight plan up the coast. The cylinders would plummet straight into the ocean until they brought out their guidance wings, which were scarcely more than ridges distending from the metal. They created just enough of an alteration in the course to steer the falling cylinders inland, still unnoticed. The ridges guided the cylinders directly over the White House, then pulled inside to allow the free fall to continue.

The tremendous speed of the cylinders might have punctured all the way into the underground bunker levels, but bombing the President wasn’t the intention.

The intent was to make a soft landing on the White House lawn and snatch up the most high-tech rodents in existence. FEMbots had an estimated black market value of thirty-five million dollars each.

The cylinders contained no living tissue that might be crushed by the sudden deceleration of the most severe High-Altitude/Low-Opening jump in history.

The first cylinder burst and loosed a compacted wad of dense fiber the size of a bed pillow, which unfurled into thousands of black streamers—a cloud bigger than the entire White House itself. The streamers were torn away in a millisecond by the intense force of the wind, but not before slowing the cylinder markedly and not before pulling out a second wad of compact fiber. Another billowing cloud of paperlike streamers. And a third. Finally the cylinder had been sufficiently slowed to deploy a trio of extreme heavy-lift parachutes, which opened in series and brought the cylinder to a crunching, 11-G deceleration. If there had been a man inside the cylinder, he would have become human remains in that instant.

The three huge parachutes carried the cylinder for only three more seconds before the ground loomed up beneath it and the cylinder’s tapered end penetrated the lawn soil. The landing looked smooth, but again it would have turned human occupants to jelly.

The three parachutes transformed simultaneously into flames that consumed them and vanished in a moment, allowing the second cylinder to land without tangling.

When you watched airspace over the White House, you used protocol. You never, ever deviated from the proper vocabulary of the operation.