Help! I'm trying to skirt my way around a big radioactive plot crater. My arch-villain has a device That is a proto-suitcase nuke type of atomic bomb That he tells everyone is an atomic bomb Which my protagonists have reason to believe is an atomic bomb, and With which he threatens to blow up himself and everyone in the vicinity if he's not allowed to go free but It can't look like any sort of bomb at all to the police who have him cornered such that Quite a few of them are ready and willing to shoot him full of holes if he makes one false move. It might help to say that the year is 1982, before "suitcase nuke" was a household term, and the setting is a very remote backwoods location in the Appalachians or the Ozarks: some mountainous region like that. The police involved are the county sheriffs' departments and the state highway patrol, but I don't want to make them out to be a bunch of ill-trained, toothless hillbillies. It's just that the villain is a local boy gone bad, they're tired of his crap, and they've never heard of John Aristotle Phillips. So what can this device look like? It has to be something he can hold in his left arm (not wear) while wielding a handgun with his right. He refers to it as "his baby." Previously I'd described it as looking like an oversized steel-encased stereo tuner, but even in '82, that would read "bomb of some sort," wouldn't it? However it looks, it has to come off as so innocent that the cops will say, "Okay, cut the BS about an A-bomb, put down the gun or we'll shoot." Which, per my other thread on "Whose POV"? will cause my female protagonist to freak out and try to get to the sheriff to convince him that what the villain says is true. Any suggestions?
I suppose your asking for something that looks like an ordinary item (not a suitcase) but is instead an A-Bomb? What an interesting concept. Prior to 1982 in the 70's, the cameras they used for filming movies (back when they actually used film and not pixels) were a tad hefty. One would expect them to weigh a decent amount and make all sorts of noises when in use. I don't know if your antagonist would have such a device, however, as the ones I'm thinking of were used explicitly for film production and not hobby.
Maybe something that looks like it is holding a large instrument? Keyboards where pretty popular in the 80's.
If she was female she could probably hide it in her 80's shoulder pads or big hair. In fact, if he was into glam rock he could probably conceal a reasonable sized bomb in his hair. Otherwise an 80's mobile phone is roughly the size of an intercontinental missile.
A dead man's switch gets you around the cops shooting you. I'm unclear. So what you are asking is for a bomb that the cops don't believe but the girlfriend knows is real?
Size could be enough to do it. If the cops think the box is too small to be a nuke, it doesn't matter what it looks like.
Hmm. They also can't believe it's an ordinary bomb. Now, that might be more likely because the villain's explosives cache has just gone up in flames about 20 minutes before. I think.
How about a large dufflebag? It's called that for a reason. Anyway, supposedly the Soviets had one stashed in the Shenandoah valley in the event of war, in case that helps. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitcase_nuke
And my idea was that the villain wouldn't threaten to detonate it himself; rather he'd tell the cops if they shoot him they'll set it off themselves.
Yeah go with a guitar nuke like a sequel to Desperado. "When I finally learn to hit this E chord, you guys are screwed."
Backwoods folk would be very familiar with dynamite, and a suitcase or large paint can filled with dynamite and nails would be tremendously destructive at close to medium range, so the police would be unlikely to lightly dismiss the claim of a bomb even if they didn't believe in an atomic one. Maybe if he hollowed out a large shortwave radio, or if he made it look like an ACME bomb, ball shaped with a big fuse sticking out the top and TNT painted on the side.
What about a boom box? A literal boom box? It's roughly the right time period for one of those old silver ghetto blasters that you'd stuff full of D batteries.
