She began the meeting by describing the discovery and analysis of the device found in Minnesota. A photograph of the inside of the case filled a screen on one of the Situation Room walls.
“The best way to describe this bomb is to say that it’s a classic piece of Russian military design: basic, but effective. What they did was essentially the same concept as Little Boy, the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima more than forty years ago. It’s what’s known as a gun-type design. This here”-she pointed at the metal pipe filling most of the case-“is the gun barrel. It’s fired by a signal sent from the control box, here, in the form of an electric charge. It passes down this wire into one end of the barrel and ignites a conventional explosive charge. Right next to the charge is a fifteen-kilogram mass of weapons-grade uranium.”
She brought up another slide. One side of the barrel had been cut away, revealing the contents.
“Exactly like a charge of gunpowder propelling a cannonball, the explosive fires the uranium down the barrel, where it hits a second fifteen-kilo slug of uranium, at the far end. Now, a total of sixty pounds would not normally be enough to create a critical mass of uranium-two thirty-five-that’s the amount needed to create a nuclear chain reaction. But the Russians were smart. They put a ring of beryllium around the end of the barrel-see how it thickens there, at the end? That beryllium acts as a reflector, concentrating the forces released by the impact, so that the reaction takes place at a lower mass. That creates a nuclear explosion, which we’d estimate in the range of one to five kilotons. That’s nothing compared to a strategic nuclear-missile warhead, but it’s still enough to devastate the heart of a major city, take out a military base, or flatten an oil refinery.”
“Dear God…” Horabin’s sagging, downcast face-all drooping jowls, double chins, and baggy eyes-was ashen. “And you’re sure this thing is Russian?”
“Well, it was certainly manufactured from Russian components, using their uranium. And we believe it’s at least a decade old, dating back to Soviet days, when the state still had total control of all its stocks of weapons-grade nuclear materials. So it was made either by a Soviet government agency or by someone with very, very high-level access.”
“And it’s still in working order?”
“Well, thankfully it didn’t detonate when… ah”-she hesitated for a moment, hoping that no one could see the blood she felt flushing her cheeks-“when struck by a heavy falling object. But we couldn’t find anything wrong with the basic bomb. Anyone with the correct arming code could have set it off.”
“Excuse me, Dr. Jones…” The speaker was Ted Jaworski, the CIA representative. “When we investigated the Lebed claims at Langley, our analysts told us that if the bombs really did exist, they would most likely be inactive by now. But you’re saying that’s not the case. How come?”
Kady felt the atmosphere in the room crackle with anticipation. Jaworski was making a play, pitching his agency against hers. The people around the table were Washington veterans. They seemed to lean forward a fraction, anxious to see if the newcomer could defend herself.
“That’s simple,” she said, letting the room know that the question hadn’t fazed her. “Your people would have made the same assumption we did at Los Alamos before we’d actually seen this thing. We all figured the Soviets would use plutonium for any small-scale weapon, because that’s what we would have done. Plutonium is far more efficient than uranium. You get a much bigger bang per kilo. But it also decays a lot faster. Much beyond a decade, it’s lost its explosive power, so the whole unit needs servicing and updating. But uranium lasts for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s crude. It’s inefficient. But it keeps right on working.”
Kady saw Jaworski give her a slight nod of the head, an acknowledgment that she’d passed his test.
“All right,” said Horabin. “I get it.”
He looked at the agency representatives around him. “I have to brief the President on this, and I don’t want to walk into the Oval Office with nothing but bad news. We know there are bombs out there. Now we’ve got to get to them-all of them-before our enemies get there first. I need a strategy. What have you got for me?”
The agencies had all received preliminary briefings prior to the meeting. As a matter of institutional pride they had already drafted action plans. Five of the men reached for their cases and withdrew their documents. Only Jaworski remained motionless, indifferent to the activity around him.
“Don’t you have anything, Ted?” asked Horabin.
“Yes, I have one very strong piece of advice.”
“Great. Let’s hear it.”
“Do nothing.”
There was a murmur of disapproval around the table.
Horabin glared at him: “Is that all you have to offer?”
The CIA man seemed unruffled. “It’s all I recommend right now, in public, at least. The only thing we have going for us is that no one knows what we’ve found. If we start mounting search operations, people will want to know what we’re looking for. And, believe me, they will find out. So then we’ll have a major diplomatic incident with the Russians. We’ll have the TV news telling folks there could be nukes in their backyards. And we’ll have every terrorist leader in the world trying to figure out how he can get one of these things for himself.
“That means we’ve got to be discreet. I suggest a small, dedicated team, backed by the full resources of all our agencies. This team must be tasked to search for any clues to who’s got these bombs, where they are, and who still knows how to make them explode. But they’ve got to do this quietly-and I mean really, really quietly.”
42
The first morning, Carver stumbled over the finish line of his three-mile course like a newborn foal on an ice rink, unable to control the skis and poles on the end of his thrashing, twitching, uncoordinated limbs. He lay facedown in the snow, his chest heaving, his throat gagging until Thor Larsson reached down, grabbed the collar of his windproof jacket, and dragged him, coughing and wheezing, to his feet.
“Keep moving,” growled Larsson. He hit Carver hard across the backside with a ski pole, just to underline the order.
“I said move,” he repeated.
Carver raised his goggles onto his forehead and stared at Larsson with an expression that combined exhaustion and loathing in equal proportions.
“Thought this was the end,” he finally croaked, dragging icy air into his lungs between each word.
Larsson shook his head.
“Move,” he said for a third time, wielding his stick again. “Now!”
Carver spat emphatically into the snow, just inches from Larsson’s skis. He yanked his goggles back down and set off again along the municipal trail that snaked through the countryside around Beisfjord, a small town near Narvik on the northwest coast of Norway, inside the Arctic Circle. Spring might be blooming across the rest of Europe, but up here winter had yet to relax its deep-frozen grip.
They barely hit walking pace past stands of stunted, bedraggled birch trees. Carver struggled for rhythm as he lifted his heels and slid his metal-edged, military-specification Asnes mountain skis forward, all the while driving his poles into the hard-packed snow.
Larsson had been cross-country skiing since he was in kindergarten. He’d received winter training during his national service as an intelligence officer in the Norwegian Army. He effortlessly glided ahead, always ensuring that no matter how hard Carver tried to catch up, he was always tantalizingly out of his reach.
They’d gone about another half-mile when they came to a rifle range, located by the trail so that biathletes could practice their shooting and skiing in competition conditions. Carver followed Larsson into the range, pulled off the Anschütz Fortner target rifle strapped across his back, and flopped down on his belly by one of the firing positions.