Chapter 23

The invitation to attend the swearing in ceremony had been hand delivered by a Secret Service agent at the office. Mike had opened it and read that he had a reserved seat in the back row. He tossed the invitation on his desk and promptly forgot about it. He would have missed the ceremony except that Cathy had watched him open the invitation. When he arrived at work the morning of the ceremony, she asked him what he was doing there.

The trip to the White House had taken almost two hours longer than usual. Listening to the radio, he heard report after report of terrorist actions all around the capitol area. Several embassies had been bombed, a mall had been attacked, a drive-by sniper was shooting people, and bombs had been discovered on several of the bridges. The upshot of his forgetfulness and the traffic delays was that he found that he was approaching the security gate a whole three minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to begin.

Although Mike had expected the security around the White House to be tight, all of the events around the area had drained resources away from it. Capitol Police had been diverted to take care of real emergencies. The majority of security was being provided by young soldiers who were mostly inexperienced in this kind of activity. The problem was that they were a show of force rather than security.

Mike had just gotten into line to enter the grounds of the White House when there was the sound of distant gunfire. He turned to see the military presence move away from the White House to take up positions a little closer to the action. The suited security types had moved inside the grounds of the White House and closed the gate leaving a handful of privates guarding it. Mike looked around and saw that he was standing in a security vacuum.

The thought that things didn’t look good crossed his mind at the same time that a lot of excited shouting erupted behind him. He turned and saw people running away from the Old Executive Office Building. They were shouting that there was a bomb on the steps.

Mike looked at the gate and then in the direction of the Old Executive Office Building. He took off in a slow jog in the direction of the building. He figured that if someone from the Bomb Squad didn’t show up soon enough, that his education in electrical engineering would come in handy.

There was a white faced security guard standing on the steps watching a very large backpack. Mike went up to him and asked, “What’s the problem?”

“There’s a bomb and the timer says that it’s going to explode in three minutes,” the security guard answered.

“Where’s the bomb squad?” Mike asked wondering how it was that the only security person at the building was a rental cop.

He wondered where the Secret Service was and then realized they were probably busy taking care of the President Elect. A couple of soldiers had followed him, but they just looked scared.

“They are five minutes away,” the man answered. He was seriously considering running away. Keeping a job that paid ten dollars an hour was not worth getting blown up.

“Damn,” Mike said. He leaned over and looked inside the backpack. The timer was down to about two and a half minutes. He asked, “Do you have a pocket knife?”

“Are you kidding? Of course not,” the security guard answered. With so many security checkpoints almost no one carried pocket knives any more.

Mike looked around and asked, “Does anyone else here know how to dismantle a bomb?”

Seeing that there was no one else around with a clue what to do, Mike knelt down and examined the bomb. He thought he recognized the design. He tapped the center of the cylindrical casing and found that it was hollow confirming his suspicions. With a sick feeling in his stomach, he realized that this wasn’t just a little bomb intended to go boom. This was a big bomb that would produce a mushroom cloud. It might be a small mushroom cloud, but it would be large enough to basically take out a city block or two.

An amazing sense of calm settled over him. In a soft voice, he said, “What we have here is a suitcase atomic bomb.”

“Oh shit,” the security guard said a fraction of a second before he took off running. He didn’t know if he was going to get far enough away by running, but he sure was going to try. Deciding that Mike was the only one who even had a clue as to what to do, the soldiers backed away.

Mike folded back the edges of the backpack and examined the bomb a little more carefully. It looked like it was a gun type atomic bomb with two masses of Uranium in a tube separated by a small distance. Explosives at one end of the tube would detonate and force the masses of Uranium together with sufficient force to achieve critical mass.

He said, “Yep, an atomic bomb — the simple version.”

He looked up to see that the soldiers had backed away even further. Shaking his head, he bent down to examine the bomb to see if he could figure out how it was assembled. It clearly hadn’t been built to military specifications. There was a rat’s nest of wires. It took him a couple of seconds to realize that most of the wires were just there to confuse the issue. He traced out the wire connecting the timer to the detonator.

Mike looked around and shouted, “Does anyone have anything that can cut a wire?”

When no one answered, he knew that he was going to have to brute force the matter. Not seeing another wire connected to the detonator, he said, “If I had something to cut this wire with, we’d be safe. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

Mike reached in and grabbed the wire. He pulled it out of the device. The timer continued counting down. It was at forty seconds. Pleased that it hadn’t exploded, he said, “It can’t be that simple. There must be another detonator in here somewhere. Ah, there it is, and there’s the wire to it.”

With another yank, he pulled the wire from the second detonator. This wire was a lot more difficult to remove. He glanced at the timer and noticed that there were still twenty-eight seconds on it. He looked around trying to see if there were any other detonators, but he didn’t spot one. He glanced at the timer and noticed that it was flashing zero.

Smiling, he said, “I guess that worked.”

He sat down on the steps, a small distance from the backpack. He looked around and spotted the soldiers staring at him. In a somewhat distracted way, he noticed that they were a mixture of Army and Navy. It wasn’t even a single service represented. There wasn’t a single Sergeant stripe amongst the whole lot of them.

It was at times like this that he wished he smoked. It just seemed like the perfect moment to light up a cigar. Instead, he looked up at the blue sky and considered how close he had come to oblivion. He tried to imagine what the expression would have been on his face when the bomb exploded if he had made it to the ceremony on time instead of showing up late.

He was trying to decide if he would have looked bored by the speeches or surprised by the flash of light when his thoughts were interrupted by a man who asked, “Are you the security guard who called in a bomb?”

“No. He ran off after I told him that it was an atomic bomb,” Mike answered. The man was dressed in bulky padding with a plastic shield over his face. The expression on the man’s face after hearing that it was an atomic bomb was priceless. Mike said, “Don’t worry. I disarmed it.”

The man leaned over and looked in the backpack. He could see the numbers flashing zero. Each time the numbers flashed, his sphincter clenched. He was looking at a nightmare that fortunately hadn’t ended with a bang. Barely able to talk, the man asked, “How?”

“I pulled the wires off the detonators. There were two of them. One was hidden underneath,” Mike answered.

“Pulled?”

“I didn’t have anything with which to cut them,” Mike answered.

“Damn.”

Shaking his head, Mike said, “You know that whole countdown to one thing they always show in the movies?”

“Yes.”

“It was disarmed at twenty-eight,” Mike said getting up from the steps. More people were approaching them from where the bomb squad had parked their truck. He looked around and asked, “Where’s the nearest restroom?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure there’s one in the building there,” the man answered gesturing to the door at the top of the stairs.

“Good. I better find one soon. When my asshole relaxes, I’m going to shit a brick,” Mike said heading towards the building.

“What’s your name?”

“Mike Bowman.”

Mike was followed into the building by two members of the bomb squad and a couple of the soldiers. He did manage to find a restroom in time. That was the high point of his afternoon.

After four hours of being grilled by various men in dark suits concerning his role in disarming the bomb, Mike had finally returned to his home. Feeling like he had gone twenty rounds with a heavyweight boxer, all he wanted to do was to relax. Ten minutes after entering the house he was lying on the massage table.

As Kim worked over his back, he groaned and said, “That feels so good.”

Kim Sung smiled and worked the muscles of his back some more. She’d never felt him so tense and could understand why he had asked her for a massage. Thinking about it, she realized that it was the first time he had ever requested one.

Curious, she asked, “Did you have a bad day?”

“I guess you could say that,” Mike mumbled. He jumped when she pressed on a particularly tight muscle.

“Just relax. I’ll take care of it,” Kim said. She had just finished saying that when the doorbell rang.

Mike was off the table and at the door in a flash. The gun from the table by the door was in his hand as if by magic. He peered through the spy hole of the door and recognized the Secret Service Agent.