The intercom speaker on the exterior bulkhead crackled with a shrill, metallic burst of laughter.
Through two inches of reinforced quartz glass, Director Evelyn Cross leaned close to her desktop microphone. The brief shock of watching her guards fall had vanished, replaced by a flush of malicious triumph. Behind her, the amber glow of the Continental 816R transmitter tubes painted long, bloody shadows across the mahogany floorboards.
“Look inside the box, Clerk!” Cross’s voice echoed through the external speaker, cutting clean through the fifty-five-knot gale.
“Did you really think an amateur from a corner grocery store could outmaneuver an executive notary? I pulled the copper bridge-bar forty minutes ago!”
Julian stood motionless on the vibrating steel grating. Freezing sea spray stung his cheeks, but his eyes never left the open bronze housing.
Inside the transfer box, the four-inch void between the two heavy copper bus-bars looked wider than the Atlantic Ocean. The lower bus ran four hundred feet straight down the tower’s spine into Studio B. The upper bus ran two hundred feet higher into the storm clouds, feeding the multi-bay dipole array at the peak of the mast.
Without that four-inch solid copper blade, Studio B could pump fifty thousand watts up the Heliax pipe until dawn and not a single microvolt would reach the city. The entire signal would slam into the open terminal, reflect straight back down the waveguide, and blow the studio exciter tubes to glass dust.
