The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [115]
"Dazzle them, Elizabeth."
"Won't be hard." She smiled at him and left.
The task proved much harder than he'd expected. Ghosn thought about asking for help, but decided against it. Part of his aura in the organization was that he worked alone with these things, except for the donkey work for which he would occasionally require a few strong backs. The bomb/device/pod turned out to be of sturdier construction than he'd expected. Under the strong work lights, he took the time to wash it off with water, and found a number of unexplained items. There were screw-in points which were plugged shut with slot-bolts. On removing one, he found yet another electrical lead.
More surprising, the bombcase was thicker than he'd expected. He'd dismantled an Israeli jamming pod before, but though it had mostly been of aluminum construction, there had been several places where the case had been of fiberglass or plastic, which was transparent to electronic radiation.
He'd started on the access hatch, but found it nearly impossible to pry open and tried to find something easier. But there wasn't anything easier. Now he returned to the hatch, frustrated that several hours of work had led nowhere.
Ghosn sat back and lit a cigarette. What are you? he asked the object.
It was so much like a bomb, he realized. The heavy case - why hadn't he realized that it was so damned heavy, too heavy for a jamming pod but it couldn't be a bomb, could it? No fuses, no detonator, what he had seen of the inside was electrical wiring and connectors. It had to be some kind of electronic device. He stubbed the cigarette out in the dirt and walked over to his work bench.
Ghosn had a wide variety of tools, one of which was a gasoline-powered rotary saw, useful for cutting steel. It was really a two-man tool, but he decided to use it alone, and to use it on the hatch, which had to be less sturdy than the case itself. He set the cutting depth to nine millimeters and started the tool, manhandling it onto the hatch. The sound of the saw was dreadful, more so as the diamond-edge of the blade bit into the steel, but the weight of the saw was sufficient to keep it from jerking off the bomb, and he slowly worked it down along the edge of the access hatch. It took twenty minutes for him to make the first cut. He stopped the saw and set it aside, then probed the cut with a bit of thin wire.
Finally! he told himself. He was through. He'd guessed right. The rest of the bombcase seemed to be four centimeters or so, but the hatch was only a quarter of that. Ghosn was too happy to have accomplished something to ask himself why a jamming pod needed a full centimeter of hardened steel around it. Before starting again, he donned ear protection. His ears were ringing from the abuse of the first cut, and he didn't want a headache to make the job worse than it already was.
The 'Special Report' graphics appeared on all the TV networks within seconds of one another. The network anchors who'd risen early - by the standards of their stint in Rome, that is - to receive their brief from Dr Elliot raced to their booths literally breathless, and handed over their notes to their respective producers and researchers.
"I knew it." Angela Miriles said. "Rick, I told you!"
"Angie, I owe you lunch, dinner, and maybe breakfast in any restaurant you can name."
"I'll hold you to that," the chief researcher chuckled. The bastard could afford it.
"How do we do this?" the producer asked.
"I'm going to wing it. Give me two minutes, and we're flying."
"Shit." Angie observed quietly to herself. Rick didn't like winging it. He did, however, like scooping the print reporters, and the timing of the event made that a gimme. Take that, New York Times! He sat still only long