Viper had assumed that they were going to tie James Kramer up and beat the hell out of him, but that was not the case. James had taken a liking to Hacker and was actually talking to him freely.
“You improved your father's invisibility material.”
James nodded, he passed Hacker his notepad, which was filled with detailed sketches and wild equations. Hacker looked through the book, and found the page he was looking for, the design for the invisibility material that had been used to coat the Russian missiles.
“It's radar resistant, infrared can't see it and it's invisible to the naked eye. It's beautiful.”
Scorpio stepped in, “it's disgusting. That material will kill millions of people.” She waited, expecting to have a response of horror from James but instead he simply said.
“So, you're from the future.”
Hacker nodded.
“And we've come to stop you from selling that design to the Russians.”
“Why would I sell it to the Russians?”
“I don't know, maybe they gave you more money for it.”
James shook his head. “You don't get it. My dad always put me down, said I would never be anything as good as he had been. He said he had contributed to science, to the world but that I never would do that. I guess that hate clouded his view of his creation, you see the Russians, they had the final piece of the puzzle. They had the pattern he needed, but he refused to see it.”
Hacker was listening intently to this, “It's said that they've been working on the right pattern for over a hundred years, ever since the Cold War.”
“The Cold War?” Viper asked.
“A war where neither of the aggressor countries attack each other directly, it was in the 1960s, if I'm not mistaken, American and Russia.”
“I remember reading about that,” Scorpio added, “America drove back Soviet troops and then left the... Vietnamese, wasn't it, to it.”
Hacker shook his head, “history has a way of being written by the victor, but that war didn't really have a winner. The US pushed Soviet forces back but then the Soviets did the same and then the US go again. In the end the country was split in half, and, as you know, still is.” He turned to James, and urged him to go on.
“My dad hated the Russians so much, ever since mum left. She was deported back to Ukraine twenty or so years ago, the Russians control that area now, there was a lot of violence at the time, she was one of the casualties in the take over of Kiev.”
“I'm sorry,” was the instant response from Scorpio.
“I was only one then so, you know,” he wafted his hand back and forth, “no emotional connection. Never knew her. But my father's view of me fuelled my desire to perfect his work, to make it so much better than what his work ever was. If I could do that then I would die happy. And I've almost done it too. They are designing a new power source in South Korea that would be capable of powering the shielding for the material.”
“You need a power source?”
“Of course, without it the material would just rust, or burn up, or something like that, I don't know yet but it was one of the reasons that my father couldn't get his design to work for anything over a metre squared, but with a protective shield over it you can have it as big as you want, even, you know to cover a missile.” His eyes sparkled as the ideas churned in his mind, “and the burning of the rocket fuel, that could power the device itself, it all works out.”
