Free The Tin Man by Dale Brown

little.”
    The camera changed back to a shot of Masters, amazingly still sitting in his seat. “I also made a curtain of BERP material between the coach- and first-class sections of the plane. There is no BERP anywhere else on the plane. I’m leaving the coach section unprotected just to show the kind of damagewe’re talking about, and also just because I like to see things blow up.” Masters paused, grinning like a kid at the zoo, then put on a set of headphones. “I will now detonate all three crates of explosives, starting with the cockpit. Here we go …”
    “What!”
Fenton and several of the others shouted almost in unison. “Are you
crazy
, Masters? Do you actually plan on blowing up that plane
with you inside it
? Get the hell out of that plane, right now! …”
    But the screen had changed to four separate shots: The upper half of the screen showed the overhead satellite view of the airliner; on the lower half, one shot showed Masters in the first-class section; one showed the cargo compartment underneath the first-class section of the plane; and a third showed a shot of the cockpit from outside, right from the nose of the airliner looking through the copilot’s windscreen. Masters waved once to the camera and held up a box with three large red switchguards on it.
    “Is he serious, Dr. Kaddiri?” Fenton asked. Kaddiri didn’t know how to respond. They could very well be watching Jonathan Colin Masters’s last day on earth, and she was powerless to stop him. “Is he going to …”
    As if in response, Masters lifted the first red switchguard, gave a last jovial “Fire in the hole, folks!” and pressed the button underneath. The entire audience leaped to its feet in shock as the images unfolded before them.
    The cockpit was the first to go. It erupted with a bright yellow fireball, but amazingly only the pilot’s windows blew out, sending a shaft of fire and smoke sideways out of the plane—the copilot’s windows crazed into white spiderwebs but did not break. In the first-class section, Masters jumped in surprise,but there was no other hint that fifty pounds of TNT, enough to bring down a small building, had just exploded less than thirty feet in front of him.
    “I’m fine! I’m fine!” he shouted gleefully. “Perfectly all right! That was a fifty-pound TNT explosion just a few feet away from me, and I’m fine!” The airline executives looked relieved and angry at the same time—relieved that he was all right, and angry that they had been forced to watch such a suicidal display.
    “Washington, Washington, this is Range Control,” an excited voice cut in on the closed secure link. “Helen, I’m picking up a power surge in the BERP circuits. I’ve set the explosives continuity circuits to safe. Jon, if you can hear me, you better get out of the plane now. That surge could cause the rest of the BERP to malfunction—it could even set off the other explosives.”
    Jon touched his earset so he could hear better through the ringing aftermath of the explosion that had erupted right in front of him. “Negative!” he shouted. “Don’t safe those circuits! I’m all right! We can continue the …”
    A second later, seen from the overhead satellite view, the entire aft section of the airliner heaved and flopped awkwardly into the air, the cargo section completely blasting apart before it was obscured by smoke and debris. Masters never touched the detonate button—and if he had, it would have had no effect because the range safety officer had terminated the test and disconnected all detonation power from both the arming switch and the explosives. But the surge of energy in the BERP material had-discharged through the cabin, grounding on the nearest available object—the fifty-pound case of TNT. The electrical discharge was enough to bypassthe safety interlocks, set off the electrically actuated blasting caps, and detonate the TNT.
    Masters was thrown back into his seat as the entire interior