Episode 1
December 20
1925 hours
Over the Gulf of Guinea, West Africa
The twenty four megaton Lockheed
Martin L-27 Super Hercules II rocked
and bobbed silly, like a mere sleeve of
paper in a hurricane.
“Shit!” Captain James “Bobby” O’Riley
swore under his breath, pulling the
stick with all his might, trying to steady
the cargo plane. Like the crack of a
whip, lightning streaked through the
sky, spreading its tendrils before them
and illuminating the dark clouds for a
moment. Rain, as huge bomblets of icy
water, hammered the flying vessel, its
rhythmic intensity rising and falling like
the mad compositions of a slightly
deranged music master. The nose of
the plane jerked up and fell, point
down, like the ECG reading of a patient
in cardiac arrest. And O’Riley held the
stick, static, with stretched and strained
muscles, like a stroke victim. However,
he knew they were now in the hands of
the weather. And, oh, how merciless
those hands were.
“The electric storm is messing with our
instruments, James,” Major Chris “Jay”
Fredrick, his co-pilot, said. “The
altimeter, the compass, the landing
systems, even our clock. It’s all gone to
shit.”
James shot his co-pilot a wicked glare
which the lanky, black man did not
notice, or noticed and chose to ignore,
James could not tell. It wasn’t the bad
news he had given that angered James;
it was the way he had delivered the
message: with as flat a voice as the
surface of an LCD display screen. How
could he be so calm when they were
about to be torn to pieces? James
returned his gaze to the dark sky that
sped past them and remembered the
last few bleak words of his flight
instructor on the first day of flight
school. The grey bearded man,
Jabowasky was his name, had picked
up a plain sheet of paper and held it up
for all to see. This is your plane, the man
had said. Then he had crumpled it into
a ball and said, that’s what happens
when it gets into a storm. A man like
Jabowasky didn’t grow to be as old and
experienced as he was by flying
through lightning storms. And for all
their sophistication, the flight
instruments were really to prevent flight
through a thunder storm. Thunder
storms were the dread of the sky. That
dread, James thought, was upon them.
Captain James O’Riley wasn’t a spiritual
man, and as such, he didn’t know what
to make of Christ or Krishna. But if there
was a God, he sure needed His help.
Like all men everywhere, James feared
death. What happened after? he
thought, and as his heart beat as fast as
the plane hurtled through the clouds,
the near presence of death became
palpable. He could die at any moment,
he realized with a sudden streak of
apprehension. Lightning could strike
the fuselage and cause cabin
decompression, s-----g them out into
the wild rain. Or it could strike the
engines, plummeting them down to the
ground. Or it could strike the fuel line,
causing a flash of light, a sudden
eviscerating pain, and the silence of
death. Or it could crumple them just like
Jabowasky had so vividly illustrated. To
James, this was the worst way to die in
the sky. He decided that if he were to
die, he would prefer to die quickly and
painlessly. But did life give you what
you preferred? Or did it give you what
you deserved? James had done so many
shitty things in his secret government
work. Maybe this was payback by the
powers that be: Christ or Krishna.
“Sir, do you think we should radio
base? Advise them of our current
situation?” his flat voiced copilot said
beside him.
“No,” James said immediately,
mindlessly shaking his head. “We’ve got
strict orders, Chris. No radio contact
until we land. What we are doing is a
breach of international laws. Though no
West African country can pick our
transmission, the Egyptians might.”
The huge plane rattled vigorously again,
and lightning spread before them like
fiery, white neural pathways. The
thunder that followed drowned the
constant beep beep of the flight
instruments (the kind that told you you
were screwed) and the pelt of the rain,
and put the fear of God in Chris for a
moment. But it was just a moment,
James observed, as the man shook off
fright as if it were a speck of dust on
his shoulder. This served to vex James
even more. Did Chris think he was God?
Had he some delusion that he was
invincible and therefore couldn’t die in
the sky?
Another plane rattling thunder returned
his focus to his flying.
James glanced at the flight dashboard.
Every spindle was askew, the light
blinked erratically—their whole
electrical system had been fried, he
noticed for the first time. Somehow,
they had been hit once by lightning—a
minor hit, though. The plane jerked out
of control for a while, shooting up like a
car running a speed breaker. James
fiercely fought the control stick to bring
the plane back on course. Though what
course they were on, he did not know.
All he knew was they were headed for
United States AFRICOM base in Djibouti
when they had hit a shit storm off the
gulf of guinea. The weather people had
said there was no storm in these parts
at this time; someone had screwed up.
If there wasn’t anything James knew, at
least he knew that in this line of work,
when people screwed up, other people
died. Just like he and his co-pilot were
about to die.
“If we stay longer in this storm, James,
we’re not going to make it,” Chris said
with a twinge of frustration in his voice.
“We have to land this plane or go
higher.”
“Landing is out of it,” James replied,
facing his co-pilot briefly. “And we can’t
go higher. Our payload is too heavy. The
engines won’t support any more
altitude.”
“Then dump the cargo,” Chris said,
more frustration in his voice.
James O’Riley frowned at the man. The
ease with which Chris was willing to
give up their cargo was not only
troubling, it was also scary. James
looked away from the man and kept
silent, thinking this was the last he
would hear or think about dumping
their cargo.
But the idea had been planted, and an
idea was like a seed. Once planted or
conceived, it grew. And depending on
variations in atmospheric and soil
conditions, the speed of growth of a
seed could be hastened or delayed. In
James’s case, it only took two minutes
for the idea to germinate and form part
of his will; this was majorly because
there was a third man in the dark
cockpit. His name was death. He was
really persuasive.
“We can’t weather this storm, James,”
Chris pressed, “sooner or later, we’re
going to run into a storm cloud and
come out a sphere of tangled metal.”
James’s only hesitation was their cargo.
He didn’t know exactly what it was. The
manifest said “Medical Supplies,” but he
had decided it was just a cover up. An
approval to transfer supplies didn’t
need to come from as high up as the
office of the president of the United
States. Though the package was as
small as a briefcase, hand delivered by
nondescript men from USAMRIID which
was another cause for concern, it was
sealed within a 400 ton, steel-
reinforced concrete vault that could
withstand a mortar shell. Why did
medical supplies need to be so
protected? Only WMDs were this
protected. Still, James could not be sure.
And he wasn’t going to risk his life on
the off chance that he might be
carrying a biological weapon.
“Use the map. Try to triangulate our
current position,” James said. “I’m
going to drop it in a forest or a lake so
our boys can pick it up in the morning.”
Chris found the map and started
working, using light from the lightning
storm to draw lines and circles on a
portion of the paper. They were flying
over Nigeria now. That was good, since
Nigeria was a developing country and
still had miles and miles of forest areas
—plenty of land to hide a container
sized vault.
James began slowly dropping the plane,
releasing the stick little at a time. He did
that until he began to make out the
minute lines of a city.
“We are currently above Akwa Ibom,”
Chris said, peering at his map. “We
should be coming up on a small
uninhabited forest a little to the west.”
James looked in that direction and
made out the tall trees; he angled the
plane in that direction.
Thunder struck. This time, it hit the
plane.
There was an explosion, then the plane
capsized. James struck his head against
the side of the plane. Intense pain
lighted his senses. He growled and
yanked the stick to the side. The plane
spun again, right side up. It shook and
made to fall out of the sky; somehow, it
remained afloat. The number of beep
beep in the cockpit quadruped.
“We’ve lost an engine,” Chris roared.
“We can’t dump the cargo from the
cockpit,” James replied, his heart
steadily striking the walls of his chest.
“You have to use the emergency button
in the cargo hold. Go now! We only
have a one minute window!”
Chris struggled with his seat belt,
unhooked it, and scurried out of his
chair.
James held the stick tighter, knowing
that the life of his co-pilot now
depended on the plane staying level.
There was a sharp hiss and a low, long
rumble, as the cargo bay doors began
to open. Few seconds after that, the
nose of the plane pitched upwards
slowly as the cargo slid toward the
open door. Chris ran into the cockpit
and secured himself in his chair. The
moment James felt the cargo drop, he
pulled hard on the stick. The plane
sprung up responsively, shooting
higher and higher into the clouds even
by the power of one engine. In five
minutes, they were beyond the clouds
and flying steadily towards Djibouti.
They had seen a dim flare of light, and
they had felt a weak shock wave, and
they had assumed it was lightning.
They had been wrong.
If they had known what the dim flare
and weak shock wave meant, they
would have chosen to die rather than
land their plane on the wet tarmac of
Camp Lemonnier, AFRICOM base in
Djibouti, two hours later. Less than
thirty six hours later, the two pilots
would swear under oath before a
military tribunal that they had never
known they were flying over land,
when they had dumped their cargo.
***
Cargo MH-XZ424G crashed through the
sky, ridding the endless waves of the
rain. It was twelve feet in all directions
and had, when not in use, a hollow,
briefcase sized core. Every other part
was impenetrable, 400 ton, steel-
reinforced concrete built by Vault
Technologies™ (VT) to withstand any
kind of assault. And as you can imagine,
it fell through the sky at a frightening
pace.
This particular unit was designed by Mr.
Jon Von Neuman and built at a special
processing facility in Frankfurt. It was
built on the 25th of March, 2013. Its
batch class was 2D74, and its
processing number was 744/29Z/7XZ.
The truth is VT’s vaults were built to
withstand almost anything. But there
were two reasons for the failure of
vault MH-XZ424G. First, the cohesion
enhancing chemical, Bindichem®, was
added in a quantity that was less than
the threshold quantity. This led to the
failure of the chemical and made the
vault prone to fracture. The global
economic meltdown had hit Germany.
The production plant had had to cut the
cost of production. This was the only
way Mr. Jon Neuman knew how to cut
cost. A way that would eventually lead
to countless deaths.
Second was the condition that Captain
James “Bobby” O’Riley had subjected
the vault to, when he had dumped it
into a lightning storm. The company’s
test team had subjected their vaults to
water, fire, wind, explosions,
avalanches, and a host of other extreme
situations. They had proven the
toughness of their product. However,
had they conceived that their vaults
would be subject to a lightning storm
under a whipping rain in the night?
And so, as cargo MH-XZ424G fell
through the sky, a tiny fault line
developed on its surface. The sky’s
rebellion against such monstrosity
barreling through its volume was a roar
that carried far. The rain pelted the steel
cube, giving a machine-gun like rat-a-
tat-a-tat. Heat simmered on the vault’s
smooth, metal surface due to air
friction; the vault trailed a thin line of
vapor as it fell. Numerous electrons
gathered on the slippery surface just as
the cargo cleared the final ceiling of
clouds and approached the dark,
sleeping city of Uyo. The assembled
electrons, teeming on the surface of the
metal, called lightning to the vault like
the hammer of Thor, god of thunder.
Strike after strike, the fault line
deepened and spread like the roots of a
germinating seed, until the shattered
parts of the vault fell away from the
exposed briefcase like expended fuel
tanks from an ascending space rocket.
The exposed briefcase flared up
immediately on exposure releasing six
pressurized canisters into the air. The
briefcase flared up because of the
intense heat that clung to the
plummeting wreckage. This intense
heat affected the canisters which
contained U-235 WMD agents.
The canisters exploded with a fire,
releasing its content as a fine spray. The
wind spread the released content into a
blanket that covered the city of Uyo and
its outskirt villages. Though the
canisters and the vault’s ruins would hit
ground long before the thin film would,
the descending film of death would
reach the city of men as sure as the sun.
And when it did, there would be no end
to the pain, suffering, and devastation it
would cause.