Chapter 3

Jase was still bothered by the activities of the Muslim terrorists, particularly, he wondered who had supplied the money for their operation. He had a gut feeling that the money had come from Saudi Arabia, but he had no proof. Jase fretted about the situation for a while and finally decided to ask Bill and Suzy Ardmore, the data researchers at GPD headquarters, to see what they could come up with.

It took a lot of digging through the records by the GPD computers, but they eventually came up with a connection to a cabal among some super-rich Saudis. The men were so high in the Saudi hierarchy that they couldn't simply disappear without attracting a lot of unwanted attention. Therefore, Jase needed to come up with some sort of creative scheme for eliminating them. Since they were doing this in a misguided effort to do the will of Allah, he thought that he should make their deaths/disappearances look like a deliberate act of Allah.

Lightning was always a good tool for this sort of thing, it had been as far back as Zeus, and probably even earlier. Jase jumped to GPD headquarters and asked for an appointment with M'rth to discuss an appropriate lightning generator. They met, and Jase explained what he had in mind.

All of M'rth's eyes lit up at the request, and he laughed. "We have a device that can throw an electric arc, but it is only used in our laboratory, right now. It is too big to be used as a weapon in its current form, but we should be able to get it down in size without too much effort. Yes, we'll work on such a delightfully destructive device and have Seven contact you when it is ready. We have a number of high priority projects going on right now, so it will probably be some time before we have a working weapon. However, we can always jump back in time to deliver it, so we may have it ready for you by the time you return home."

Jase thanked M'rth for his help and jumped back to his home on Earth. He had just entered the swimming pool when Seven showed up with something that looked a lot like a nail gun used to shoot nails into concrete. Jase rushed up to her and asked for details on what he knew had to be the weapon he had asked for.

Seven said, "M'rth asked me to deliver this to you, Jase. It is the lightning gun you asked for. It will shoot an arc of electricity through dry air about 20 feet. It is capable of 250,000 volts and 300,000 amps with each charge. The power supply operates off the same kind of fusion supply that powers our bodies, and it uses water for fuel. The lightning gun is operated by a trigger and is good for 25 shots before you need to add more water. The safety is good, but not perfect, so do be careful how you sling the gun around." The last was said with a smile.

"Thank you, Seven. Please tell M'rth how much I appreciate his efforts. I think that we will jump to China Lake tonight to try it out. That should worry the Navy about UFOs."

"M'rth said that they could easily make more of the guns if you needed them, now that the development has been done."

"I sure hope that one of these guns will be enough. It's my guess that it would take a major war for us to need more guns than this one. Please thank him for me, and tell him that I'll let him know."

Jase contacted the team, and they went hunting through junk yards for a Mercedes limo, since that was the sort of car that the rich Saudis like to use. Jase used his hologram projector to impersonate an older man when he bought the junker. His excuse was that he was going to use the car shell to play a trick on a friend. He had the car delivered to his home garage and that was the last time the junk yard owner saw the car.

That night, all 6 of the team members worked together and lifted the car off the ground. They jumped to a VERY empty segment of China Lake and set the car down on the sand. Jase set his external gravity field to 0.1 g and jumped over the car. When he was at the apex of his jump, he directed the lightning gun at the car roof and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened! He was very embarrassed when he discovered that he had forgotten to release the safety. Everybody, including Jase, laughed, and he tried again, this time releasing the safety on the gun before he jumped.

The gun fired and there was a blinding flash of light and a monster crash of thunder. None of the team was bothered, since they were wearing their armor and were not seeing by normal visible light, but by X-rays. They were able to play their memory back in slow motion to see what had happened to the car. At first, the car seemed to ignore the electricity, but an arc jumped from somewhere under the car to the ground, and the full power of the beam was able to flow through the car body. The rest of the show was kind of anticlimactic, since the car body simply melted! Everything within the car vaporized if it had a low enough boiling point; otherwise it, too, melted from the heat radiated by the car shell as it liquefied.

The whole show lasted less than half a second from start to finish, and the final result was a puddle of various molten metals lying on the sand. Any human who happened to be in the car would have died before he even had any idea that he was under attack. The team examined the result of their handiwork and agreed that it did, indeed, look like an act of God. About this time, their sensitive hearing detected the approach of vehicles with blaring sirens, so they jumped back home. Jase double checked—yes, he had remembered to enable the gun safety before he jumped.

They were now ready to attack the terrorist leaders in Saudi Arabia. They wanted the first attack to be very public so that there would be no doubt how the terrorist had died. Surely, they could find one of them stuck in rush hour traffic and blast him then, in order to get maximum public exposure. Ann suggested that they set up some sort of sky writing scheme to put up a sign, in Arabic, saying, "You have displeased Me!" Everybody laughed, but Jase didn't want to wait until they could set that up, though he did admit that it was a great idea.

They jumped to Saudi Arabia and began their search for the members of the cabal. These men were easy to find, since they had their names, so it was just a matter of waiting until one of them rode off in his car. It didn't take long for the car to get stuck in gridlock, so their target began diddling one of his female slaves who was in the car for just that purpose. Jase made his way through the stalled traffic to a good jumping location. This time he remembered to remove the safety on the gun before jumping. Jase repeated his attack of the previous night at China Lake, and the car disappeared in a boom and a bright flash. As an unexpected side effect, there was an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) which killed the electronic controls on all of the nearby cars, freezing them in position. This made it impossible for anyone to ignore what had happened and brought the Saudi police on the run.

Naturally, the whole affair was attributed to a terrorist attack, they just didn't know what sort of explosive had been used. Jase said, <Ann, it looks like we will have to act on your idea!> They jumped back home and "rang" for Seven.

Jase explained what he wanted when she showed up, and she disappeared. She was back a few moments later with something that looked a lot like a model airplane which had a silenced electric motor. The airplane had the same kind of invisibility attribute their armor had, so that it could become invisible on command. It had a computer on board which would do the necessary details to make the plane follow voice commands to circle, to land, etc.

On command, the airplane would release a balloon which would inflate and look like a cloud from the ground. On its side, in Arabic, would appear flashing lettering which would say, "You have displeased Me!" There was a recording of drum rolls inside the cloud to attract attention. After 5 minutes, the cloud would disappear in a flash of light. Meanwhile, the model airplane could be landed and retrieved.

Jeff's eyes lit up. He could already think of other uses for the airplane.

They decided to wait 24 hours before they tried again.

The next day, they jumped to Saudi Arabia to hunt for their next victim. The only difference between the previous terrorist and this one was that the female slave was giving a blow job when the fatal blow was delivered. The cloud was displayed as soon as the car was destroyed, which probably gave most people the impression that the cloud was the source of the lightning. Pedestrians immediately spotted the cloud and its writing and pointed to it. This caused many people in the cars also to see it, so the sign got a lot of public exposure. Someone took a photo which was shown on TV all over the world on CNN and other news services.