South Carolina writer pens new bomb mystery

Could the US Navy be searching for the Tybee bomb as you read this?

Glenn Smith thinks the Navy could easily be involved in a covert operation to locate and raise the Tybee bomb. He speculates that the Navy Seals could do it. And we might not even know.

³The last thing they want to do is make a big public show of finding it,² says Smith.

Smith is a former Navy gunnery officer himself and says you wouldn¹t believe the kind of technology the military now has at its disposal.

Smith got interested in the Tybee bomb when his daughter, who lives in Connecticut, sent him a big story about it that ran in her local newspaper, the Hartford Courant.

Smith, who lives in Sea Pines, South Carolina‹a lot closer to the bomb than his daughter‹was intrigued. He went to the Savannah library and did some research on the 1958 training exercise that ended with the dropping of a nuclear bomb somewhere off the coast of Tybee.

Smith then got busy and wrote Tybee Island Terror Plot, an action adventure novel in which the bomb is located by a group of Islamic terrorists who plan to use the plutonium in their evil plot against the western world.

In a novel, bad guys have to meet their match, so Smith also invented a sort of CIA James Bond type hero who goes by the code name Iron Hand. Iron Hand is rather closely based on Smith¹s friend, a retired Navy captain named Jack McQuesten.

Though Smith¹s book is fiction, it is redolent with local references. Readers will find that much of the action is set at Tubby¹s Tank House where ³old shrimp hand drift in and out,² Smith says.

The restaurant/bar was thrilled to learn about Smith¹s novel and promptly invited him for a book signing.

Smith also set some of the action at Savannah College of Art and Design where a fictional expert in Egyptian antiquities is the brother of an Al Quaeda terrorist. In Smith¹s novel, the SCAD employee is a ³reluctant bad guy² who gets drawn into his brother¹s evil plot.

To find out whether the guys with white hats win, you¹ll have to read the novel, which is for sale at Gallery by the Sea. But we do know that Smith is at work on a second Iron Hand action novel, so it¹s safe to say the hero lives.

In real life, the Air Force has declared the Tybee bomb to be no threat wherever it lies because the bomb lacked the trigger that would make it capable of being detonated. The bomb was dropped in a training exercise and not as an act of war.

But that doesn¹t entirely reassure Smith who says the plutonium could still be intact within the bomb¹s stainless steel core. And that plutonium could be attractive to terrorists as in his novel.

Plutonium has an afterlife of several years, Smith says. ³Once you¹ve got that, you¹re on your way to making a bomb. That¹s what the bad guys want. They want the plutonium,² says Smith.

‹L. Hamilton