Lethal Circuit by Lars Guignard

Stearn.”
    Mobi looked like he was about to say something, but then stopped.
    “Question?” Rand asked.
    “It’s nothing,” Mobi said.
    “I’d say it’s something, or you wouldn’t be standing there with you mouth half open.”
    “I have a good memory, sir, and I seem to remember you. Are you the same Colonel Rand who was detained by the Chinese government on Hainan Island after your spy plane was escorted down?”
    “I was a major back then, but yes, that’s me.”
    “Wow. Didn’t they hold you for like five days?”
    “Six if you include the night I got there.”
    “What was that like?”
    “A major international incident,” Rand said. “I really can’t comment beyond that.”
    Mobi looked like he was about to say something else but stopped himself, instead staring at the chevrons on Rand’s uniform.
    “You want to discuss fashion now?”
    “No sir.”
    “Spit it out.”
    “Not to fly my freak flag too high, Colonel, but we fly civilian missions here.”
    Alvarez took control of the situation. “So we do,” she said. “But lest you forget, the lab also receives a significant portion of its funding from the Department of Defense, and as such we’ve always remained open to their needs, just as they’ve been open to ours.” Alvarez was using her soft voice, and though she was in no way a hard edged woman, Mobi knew that soft voice meant one thing: that there were outsiders in their midst and he’d better listen. “Colonel Rand, would you like to take it from here?”
    Rand didn’t mince his words. “Can I assume Mr. Stearn has security clearance?”
    “Class Two Civilian,” Alvarez said.
    “Then let’s get to it. Being in your line of work you no doubt know that the Germans had a number of unique aircraft in development during Word War II.”
    “Sure, the V2 rocket, the Heinkel 178 jet, any number of the Horten brothers’ designs,” Mobi said.
    “So you’re aware that the V2 rocket was the predecessor to every ICBM on the planet. You know the Heinkel 178 was the world’s first jet aircraft. What do you know about the Hortens?”
    “I’m a communication engineer, not an aircraft historian.”
    “I didn’t ask you what you did for living.”
    Mobi cast a glance at Alvarez. Her look told him to play nice. “The Horten Ho 2-29 was the world’s first stealth aircraft. The Horten 18, a larger version of the 2-29, was a long range bomber. The Nazis probably would have won the war if they’d been able to get either one of them into production in time.”
    “Good. Now what you might not know is that the Germans are also said to have invented a number of lesser known technologies.”
    Mobi was quiet for a long moment. “You’re talking about the 21.”
    “So you do know something.”
    “The Horten 21 was built on the 2-29’s basic design. It was larger with an aluminum skin, but the big difference was the power source. It was supposed to contain a working low energy nuclear reactor — the holy grail of nuclear design — cold fusion.”
    “That’s right. Cold fusion. Anything else you’d like to add, Mr. Stearn?”
    “Yeah. Nobody’s ever been able to confirm the existence of the 21. And not because they didn’t try. Project Paperclip was launched by the OSS after the war to, among other things, get to the bottom of what exactly the Nazis might have done with the prototypes. They came up with nothing. Nada. As far as the official record stands, the Horten 21 was never built.”
    “It’s a good analysis, but not quite accurate,” Rand said.
    “What did I miss?”
    Rand's lips curled into a crooked smile. But there was nothing nice about it. It was a smile designed to prove a point. “You missed the little detail about one of these Nazi birds being found. Approximately five years ago, a heavily corroded Horten 21 was pulled from a Chinese rice paddy. By the time officials got to it, the locals had melted most of it down for scrap metal, but the reactor and