I have seen that look before. As a young prosecutor in Capitol City, I had sent someone with those same haunted eyes to prison. He was a man who had killed many times, and according to the doctors, he liked to do it, and given the chance would do it again. I remember some years later I stood on the riser and looked through the blinds, through the plate-glass window of a green metal room. I watched as the demons were drawn and exorcised from the eyes of Brian Danley, in the fog of the San Quentin gas chamber.
FORTY-ONE
The uranium projectile suddenly toppled from the muzzle of the gun. Instinctively Tomas reached out with his gloved right hand and caught it in midflight. But at arm’s length, reaching across the table, he couldn’t hold the weight.
The projectile’s leverage and the momentum of its fall forced his hand down until his fingers were suddenly pinched between the heavy, falling uranium slug and its fissile target.
Tomas pulled the projectile back toward his chest as the air in the room ignited in a brilliant violet light. It rippled in waves and hues of blue that Tomas had never before seen. The heat was intense. It burned his fingers right through the gloves, but Tomas was so dazzled by the radiance that he didn’t notice. As the glow from the agitated molecules of air evaporated, the heat sapped the energy from his body.
He looked down and realized he was holding the enriched uranium against his chest. He carefully laid the projectile on the table, as far from the target as he could. Then he turned and walked out the door to where Nitikin and the other man were standing.
When Yakov turned and saw him, Tomas had already lifted the protective hood from his head. His face was running with a river of sweat. Other than that, he looked fine. He was animated, smiling and laughing, like a soccer goalie who has just blocked a free kick.
He assured Nitikin that the projectile had not struck the uranium target. He had saved it, but his fingers had been pinched in the process.
Tomas did not seem to comprehend the flash of blue light and the intense heat that was still sending rising vapors of smoke off of his suit. He told Yakov that everything was all right, then lifted his right arm to pull off his glove.
Tomas stopped in midstride and looked at his hand. There was nothing left of the first three fingers but charred stumps.
Yakov reached him the instant before he collapsed. He laid him on the ground and helped him take off his suit. He hollered at Alim’s man, the one holding the ramrod, to help him. But the man just stood there shaking his head.
Alim and the rest of his cadre remained off in the trees, at least a hundred meters away. Yakov told the man with the ramrod to put on Tomas’s suit, that he would need his assistance. When the man didn’t understand, Nitikin gestured with his hands, sign language, to put it on.
The man looked at him and slowly shook his head as he backed away. Yakov yelled into the trees and a couple of seconds later he heard Alim’s commanding voice speaking in Farsi. The man looked to the trees, then back at Nitikin with a kind of trapped expression on his face. Reluctantly he stepped forward and began to put on the suit.
Nitikin hollered assurances to the translator off in the jungle, asking him to tell the man that there was no longer anything to fear. With the proper tools, Nitikin could now complete the assembly quickly and safely. They would be finished in a matter of minutes. The translation came back and the man nodded. What the Russian didn’t tell them was that Alim’s man, who was now donning the suit, was already dead. The lifetime body burden of radiation was far exceeded by his naked exposure to the wicked tail of the dragon.
Together they entered the hut. The radiation had elevated the temperature inside the room to the point that they could not remain more than two or three minutes.
Yakov had the man steady the barrel of the cannon, his bare fingers projecting through the holes burned into the right-hand glove. Nitikin retrieved the projectile with the tongs. In less than a minute, using the ramrod, Yakov seated the uranium bullet securely down the barrel of the gun.
It took another thirty seconds to insert the safety disk of uranium-238, the neutron deflector, into the slot between the end of the gun barrel and the target. Once in place, the disk of uranium-238 began doing its job. It bounced the wandering neutrons from the two elements of highly enriched uranium, the projectile and the target, back to their respective sources, instantly reducing the gain in radiation. Nitikin heard the rapid clicking from the Geiger counter on the table suddenly fall off sharply.
The safety disk of U-238 was attached to a rigid piece of steel wire. The wire protruded through a tiny hole in the side of the bomb case. A quarter-twist of the wire in a clockwise direction locked the safety disk in place. Anyone trying to remove the disk without first twisting the wire in a counterclockwise direction would snap the brittle connection between the safety disk and the wire, rendering the bomb useless. The gun would fire. The cordite explosion would destroy the barrel and bomb housing, but there would be no nuclear chain reaction. Even radioactive fallout would be minimal and generally contained to any structure the device was in.
Properly turned and pulled, the wire would slide the disk from its slot, leaving the pathway clear for the projectile to be fired into the uranium target.
The only procedure more delicate than removing the safety disk was replacing it if the need ever arose. With the bomb housing closed, it would be impossible to see the disk or the slot into which it should slide. With only the rigid wire to manipulate the disk, replacing it in the slot was a matter of trial and error. It required the deft fingers and touch of a surgeon. Even Nitikin was not sure if he could do this any longer, though in his youth, in training, he had accomplished it twice on dummy mock-ups of the warhead.
Having locked the safety disk in place, it took less than a minute to seal the lead-lined bomb case and render the device safe.
As the two men stepped from the building, Alim’s man lifted the hood from his head and smiled with a toothy grin as the expression of relief flooded his sweaty face.
Nitikin had no way of measuring the dose of radiation emitted by the ionizing blue flare. But he knew that Tomas and the smiling lad he was now looking at were both dead.
The old Russian hovered over Tomas’s bed for four days and five nights. During this entire period, neither Yakov nor the FARC physicians could do much to comfort the young Colombian.
An ocean of water could not satisfy his thirst, even if he could keep it down. He was wretched with nausea, vomited constantly, and passed bloody diarrhea as the radiation began to kill his body from within.
After three days, Tomas’s fingernails turned black. His thick, dark hair fell from his head in patches so that a nurse had to brush it from his pillow every few hours, into a box that was to be buried somewhere in a deep hole. Open sores developed around his mouth and eyes. When the doctor lifted the sheet, he realized that these bloody sores covered Tomas’s entire body.
Nitikin could not even touch him for fear of further infecting his wounds, though the Russian knew there was no hope. The end was near. A high fever set in on the fourth day as infection began to take its toll. Tomas struggled for every breath as his airway swelled and his lungs filled with fluid. Just after midnight on the fifth day, Tomas suddenly went into convulsions. He arched his back as if a steel spring had snapped in his body. He shook the entire bed for almost a minute and then went limp.