While the hull and upper works of the fishing boat were weather-worn and used, she had a new Volvo marine diesel in her engine room. Black exhaust jetted from the twin stacks as the engine responded to Hasan’s inexperienced command.
The boat heeled over as it accelerated, the angle increasing as Hasan kept the rudder buried. In moments her port rail was awash. The netting hanging from her stern derrick was caught by a swell and wrenched off the vessel.
“Hasan! The barrels!”
The two barrels sitting on the foredeck had fallen over and were rolling toward the rail.
Behind them the harbor patrol had noted the fishing boat’s erratic behavior. The security forces at the new facility were well trained and responded immediately. Red and blue lights mounted on a horizontal bar above the open cockpit snapped on. The siren started to scream as the swift vessel began chasing after the fishing boat.
Hasan saw that they were about to lose the precious barrels, though he didn’t know what made them so important. He spun the wheel to the opposite lock without easing back on the throttles. The big fishing boat leaned over to starboard, stopping the barrels’ headlong plunge. But then they started rolling the other way. For a giddy moment it reminded Hasan of a handheld plastic game he had as a boy where you had to maneuver tiny metal balls into little cups and keep them from falling from their slots until you had them all in.
Only this game he lost. He was too slow reacting to the barrels’ inexorable slide. The first five-hundred-pound drum smashed into the salt-weakened railing. The metal sagged, but held. Then the second barrel caromed into the first. The rail tore away and both steel casks rolled over the side and vanished under the black waters of the bay.
Hasan looked to Abdullah, his beautiful face a mask of confusion and shame. “What do we do?” he cried.
The patrol boat was a half mile away and closing fast. There were three uniformed men aboard, one cradling a shotgun. While another steered the speedboat, the third was shouting into a walkie-talkie.
Abdullah cursed. This wasn’t how he envisioned meeting Allah, running from a little Russian boat. “Turn us back,” he snarled.
Hasan spun the wheel once more, cutting across their own wake and driving the boat closer to the tanker terminal.
When the patrol boat was fifty yards from the fishing boat, one of the sailors called across with a megaphone, and when his hails were ignored the man with the shotgun fired a blast across the bigger boat’s bows.
“They’re shooting at us,” Hasan screamed. “We must stop. We are not close enough. We can surrender.”
“No.” Abdullah held the detonator that would blow a small charge of plastic explosives set amid the barrels of ammonia nitrate and fuel oil.
The fishing boat was still a mile from the nearest tanker when it erupted. The explosion blew a hole in the sea a half mile wide and eighty feet deep. The fisherman and the patrol craft were atomized instantly while the shock wave that raced from the epicenter at supersonic speeds blew out every pane of glass in the harbor. Flimsier structures along the quay were blown flat. The container crane withstood the blast but the containers behind it were strewn in haphazard heaps, many of them broken open, their contents littering the ground.
The explosion sent a tidal wave rearing up in all directions. Part of it went harmlessly out into the open sea, while massive walls of water pounded the port facility. Because the tanker was waiting to be loaded, she carried no ballast and rode high in the water. The wave smashed into its thousand-foot flank, rolling the ponderous vessel on its side. The titanic forces acting on it split the hull at the keel and she started to sink. The sub-sea pipelines that fed the floating terminal structure were sheared off and crude began to erupt through the surface of the bay in great reeking clots.
The fireball rising in the middle of the harbor seemed to rival the sun climbing over the Caucasus. It topped out at four thousand feet, a roiling column of fire and smoke that resembled a nuclear detonation. As the explosive force dissipated, the ocean surged back into the void the blast had gouged in the water. The torrent created by the backflow ripped floating docks from their moorings, swamping pleasure craft and small fishing smacks in the process. A bulk carrier leaving the port was dragged back a hundred yards by the surge and slammed into another big freighter entering the harbor. Both vessels were holed and started taking on water.
The echoing roar of the explosion faded, leaving in its wake the angry shriek of thousands of car alarms.
And under the surface of the churned waters of the bay two containers that had fallen from the deck of the fishing boat lay silent, their tough metal hides dented, as they’d been tossed like leaves in a maelstrom, but they had not been breached. They had come to rest close enough for the plutonium in one container to begin calling to the material in the other like a separated lover. It would take time, but the increasing exchange of charged particles would go critical and their bond would be consummated in a blast more deadly than the one that had just destroyed the harbor.
“What happened?” Mercer asked as Devrin and Ahmad continued to speak in rapid-fire Turkish.
“An explosion in Novorossiysk.”
“That’s the oil port you just mentioned,” Cali said.
“How bad?”
“Reports are just coming in now. They say the harbor was leveled. There are ships on fire and many buildings too. The media estimates the death toll in the thousands. Some eyewitnesses claim it was a small nuclear blast.”
“Poli couldn’t have refined the plutonium to make a bomb that quickly. If anything it’s a dirty bomb.”
“Which is just as bad,” Cali remarked. “And spreading plutonium dust over the sea will make cleanup virtually impossible. It will be decades before the area could be rendered safe, if it’s possible at all.”
“We have to tell the authorities about the plutonium,” Mercer said, thinking through the logical steps the Russians would be taking. The harbor would be jammed with rescue personnel, firefighters, and medical teams. They’d be running into an invisible cloud of highly charged plutonium atoms. Inhaling just a tiny amount of the radioactive dust would cause cancers of unspeakable intensity. “They have to evacuate the city as soon as possible.”
Ahmad said something to Devrin and the college student handed Mercer his satellite phone. “I do not know who to talk with to get the Russians to evacuate a city,” Ahmad added.
Mercer checked the phone, waiting a second for it to make a link with an orbiting satellite. He dialed Ira Lasko’s direct office number. Ira’s secretary answered.
“Carol, it’s Philip Mercer. I need to speak with Ira right away.”
“I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting with the President and the national security team. I assume you’ve heard what happened in Russia. Can I take a message?”
“I have some critical information about the explosion. You’ve got to get Ira for me.”
“They should be done in an hour or so. I can have him call you.”
“I’m on a satellite phone and I may lose the connection any second,” he said, keeping a tight rein on his exasperation. “I know you’re used to dealing with crises but unless you get him for me, thousands of people are going to die a horrible death.”
A few seconds passed, the phone buzzing in Mercer’s ear. “Give me a minute to transfer you to the situation room.”
She transferred Mercer to a Marine colonel stationed outside the situation room buried deep under the White House. Mercer had only to say the words “dirty bomb” for the colonel to step into the inner sanctum and bring Ira Lasko to the phone.