Characters:

-          50 year old mildly autistic genius who manages to build a small nuclear bomb

-          Teenage school-girl who plans to use a bomb to destroy the prince’s house

-          Teenage school-boy, the school girl’s friend, called ‘the hero’

-          Teenage prince who is the above teenage boy.

-          35 year old pilot, who the girl has managed to convince to fly a B17

-          Teen-age music student who finds out the genius built a real bomb.

Timeframe:

All these events were during the height of the cold war in the 1980’s.

Cold Case Mystery:

The body of a teenage woman was found beaten to death at a small airfield just outside of Waterloo in the summer of 1980.

In a seemingly unrelated event, not too long a time later, a little-known prince was admitted to hospital with an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Facts Uncovered:

In the summer of 1980, in preparation for a school play, an older (50 ish) self-employed gentleman, was offered a budget of a few hundred dollars to build a realistic looking bomb prop. The autistic gentleman couldn’t control his urge to build a real bomb and went ahead and did so. Ultimately he became a monitored person and all his tools were removed.

The young school girl found out that the genius had built a real bomb, and then essentially stole it. (She bought it from the genius for $10k - far less than it was actually worth.) $10k was transferred out of her bank account to the account of the genius. Perhaps not realizing just how powerful the bomb was, she’d made plans to drop the bomb on the prince’s house in Waterloo.

Apparently the prince had gotten about half her family killed, and the bomb was to be retribution. She attempted to steal an old B17 flying fortress in order to carry out her mission. She had convinced a pilot that she was planning to surprise her boyfriend by sky-diving onto his property.

At school the young lady lets her friend, the hero, know that she is about to carry out a covert action of some sort. She lets her friend know that she is going to ‘get that bastard the prince.’ Her friend the hero, follows her to the airfield and finds out what is about to transpire. The hero meets with the young lady in a hanger at the small airfield to try and talk his friend out of the course of action she was about to take. The hero is unable to talk the young woman out of her plans to bomb the prince’s house, and a lethal fight ensues. The young woman has never even met the prince, but is obsessed with blaming all the woes of her life on the prince.

During the course of the fight, the hero removes the detonator from the bomb and swallows it. He manages to disable the 500 pound bomb, and thwart the young woman’s plan which might destroy half the city.

The prince realizing that there are multiple people trying to assassinate him, and that a good part of a city was almost destroyed, despairs and decides to take his own life, rather than see more people killed. He shoots himself in the head.

The bomb was an ultra-sonic device probably as powerful as a small nuclear device. It was estimated to be powerful enough to destroy several city blocks. The hero feared that had it gone off in a north American city, it might start a world war.

The Plot Twist:

The hero and the prince turn out to be the same person. The young woman unknowingly told the prince who she was trying to kill, that she was trying to kill him, by telling her friend the hero.