The city of Kaiserslautern in Germany’s midsection had once been a crossroads and meeting place of kings. In more recent times it had been a major resupply and staging depot for Hitler’s armies. Since the war the area had come to contain the largest concentration of American Army and Air Force personnel anywhere in the world. Arkady Kurshin stepped off the train, hefted his single B4 bag, and walked out into the bright morning’s sun where he hailed a taxi, ordering the driver to take him out to Ramstein Air Force Base a few miles to the south. There had been absolutely no trouble on the train last night. But Kurshin had known that he would pass from the instant he’d seen the look on Allworth’s face when he’d opened the door. The only real difficulty would come at the base if he ran into someone who knew Allworth. It was possible. But the US. Air Force was a very large organization. And he only had to hold out for another thirty-six hours or so. Close, he thought with an inward smile. So very close. The cabbie was a garrulous old woman who tried all the way out to the base to engage him in conversation, but Kurshin sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. He had gotten no sleep on the train last night, and he forced himself to rest his mind for a little while. He was going to need his wits about him. But then he’d had the training. He had the intelligence. And he had Baranov’s backing.
Nothing would go wrong. Ramstein Air Force Base was a huge installation covering thousands of acres of German countryside. Much of it was underground in the old Nazi labyrinth of tunnels and storage caverns. It was the largest depot for US. and NATO nuclear weapons anywhere outside of the continental United States. Yet security on the base was very lax, these days. At the main gate he cranked down his window and showed the AP on duty his ID card, and the taxi was passed through to the Bachelor Officers Quarters across base. He paid the driver and went inside, where he signed in with the Charge of Quarters, handing over a copy of his orders. “Welcome to Germany, Sir” the young sergeant said. “Did you have a good trip”
“Tiring” Kurshin said. “What I need is a shower, a stiff drink, and a decent steak, in that order” The sergeant, whose name tag read LEVENSON, grinned. “Can do, Colonel, at least on the shower. You can get the drink and a good steak at the officers club just up the block.
“Sounds good”
“Have you signed in yet, Sir”
“No, I just got in”
“If you’ll give me four sets of your orders, I’ll have a runner take them over to base HQ for you. The commander’s off the base until Monday”
Kurshin dug out the extra sets of orders and handed them over. “How about transportation”
“I can get you a car and driver as well, soon as we get you signed in”
Kurshin grinned. The security was incredibly lax. The sergeant mistook the meaning of his smile. “No sweat, Colonel, we aim to please around here”
“So far so good” Kurshin said, his grin broadening. And he meant it.
Heat shimmered up from the desolate floor of the desert as the gunmetal gray Mercedes 560SE sedan fitted with United Nations flags on its front fenders appeared in the distance. Above, an Israeli Army Cobra gunship helicopter hovered at one thousand feet. Lev Potok, seated by the open door, lowered the powerful binoculars through which he’d watched the car and shook his head wryly. It had been only a little more than forty-eight hours since the incident and already the piranhas were gathering. “We’re in a delicate position here” Dr. Moshe Ben Avral, the facility director, had told him yesterday. “We’re operating what appears to the world to be nothing more than a fly research reactor, when in reality too many people know what is here”
“They can only guess” Potok argued. “And if they guess correctly they cannot know for certain that this is a storage depot”
“A guess is less damaging than a certainty” Dr. Avral asked. I “Of course” Potok replied, his mind for just that moment elsewhere.
Rothstein’s background so far was coming up clean, as was Asher’s. But there was no doubt that it was Rothstein who had crawled down through the intake air ducts and had let himself into the main vault. The blood on the louvered panel and inside on the floor of the air duct matched Rothstein’s, and the man had received a severe dose of radiation. So he had been to the vault and seen with his own eyes what it contained. The question was, had he had time to use the telephone in the gas station to call someone? His fingerprints were on the telephone. But had he had the time? “We were right on his tail, Major” the team leader-had reported.
“He wasn’t in that gas station for more than twenty or thirty seconds.
Time enough to make a call? Potok wondered. The shock waves of the possibility had reached the prime minister, and were coming back on them now. The depot must be moved, even though it would be impossible in under a year’s time without completely blowing security. “Then so be it” And now the UN’s Non-Proliferation Treaty Team had come knocking at their front door again. “Let’s get back” he shouted to the pilot, and the chopper peeled off to the south… God help us all if the secret was out, Potok thought. II would probably mean war. A war in which all the Arab State would almost certainly participate.
Dr. Lorraine Abbott sat in the backseat of the Mercede-, with Scott Hayes whom she had joined in London. He was with the British arm of the NPT Inspection Service. They’d been together almost continuously for twenty-four hours. First the briefings and then the travel to Israel, and she decided that she didn’t like him very much. “A waste of time”
he grumbled from where he sat slouched against the door. “They’re not going to tell us a bloody thing” Hayes was short, and dumpy-looking with long hair, a scraggly beard, and dull gray eyes. He was reputed to be a fair nuclear physicist and engineer and was a Greenpeacer, a combination Lorraine found oddly out of synch. “At least they’ll know that we’re interested, and that we’re keeping on top of things” she replied. Hayes looked at her with a little smirk. “Do you think they’ll bloody well care” Lorraine, who held her Phd. in theoretical physics from Berkeley, presently worked at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories and was on call by the NPT Inspection Service as a field observer, a job which took her away from home half a dozen times each year. She was tall, slender, and attractive, with light California blond hair and wide green eyes. Her colleagues were always surprised by her chic appearance the first time they met her. “You don’t look like a physicist” they would invariably say. Her response, if she were feeling irascible, often would be: “You do”
“They definitely care she answered Hayes, but she didn’t bother pointing out the helicopter which had just turned to the south toward the En Gedi Nuclear Research Facility a few miles off. “So what are you going to ask them: “Say, old chum, mind telling us where you’re keeping the goodies these days” Lorraine smiled. “Something like that” she said. “Bloody hell” Hayes responded and looked out the window, a petulant set to his shoulders. Lorraine opened her purse and with long, delicate fingers took out a cigarette and lit it, drawing the smoke deeply into her lungs. Her former fiance, a surgeon at the UCLA Medical Center, had always been on her back about her one vice. “You’re too bright for that, Lor” he’d said. She hadn’t minded, though, even if he was right; his one vice was his harping. No one was perfect after all.