"Ollie, do you expect anyone to believe this story? You may be interested to know that I have some news for you from Professor Modena".
"Who? I don't know any professors".
"So, you wouldn't care about him dying slowly from radiation sickness alone like a dog, in a miserable room in Girona. By the way, do you know that there is strong gamma radiation emitted from the back of your Isuzu. Our experts will be on site in a few minutes to assess the dose rate. I hope for your sake that you have not spent too much time near the device, because if you have then you are to receive a slow, agonizing death sentence, not from us, but from Allah".
"You depraved Jew, do not blaspheme the name of Allah the merciful".
"In your case I don't think he will be so merciful — you will die in terrible pain and no virgins will await you, because even if they do you will be incapable of enjoying them".
"Who are you to threaten me?"
"My name is David and I have been one step behind you for the last two months, but now it looks as if I have caught up with you. Oh, another of your friends has also been quite cooperative when he learned about your true objective. You may remember him mainly as Dr. Jay, or by his full name Dr. Jason Smalley. He confessed everything as his hatred for all Muslims is especially focused on Aryan converts to Islam whom he regards as the lowliest form of scum. He was in custody of the Spanish authorities and then extradited to the UK where he will face charges of high treason and intent to support mass murder of innocent people".
"The only Dr. Jay I know of is the basketball player Julius Erving".
"Ollie, you also have warm regards from a sweet Swedish lass, Agda, and her twin sister Alva. When they heard what you had done to Andreas, your old pal who took you into his home and organization and treated you like his best friend, they both came forth and told us all about you. Agda in particular wishes you a long prison sentence among the worst and most violent rapists and hopes you become their "darling pet". Alva would like to slowly cut off your limbs one by one but not allow you to die. It looks as if you were a good student of the book How to win friends and influence people".
"May all of them and you rot in Hell".
"Ollie, this is no way for a devout Muslim to speak. I hear that the team has of experts just arrived. Would you like to see them at work or would you rather keep a safe distance in case the device goes off?"
"David, if that is your real name, I wish to stay close and see all of you go up in a mushroom shaped cloud, together with your whole country".
"Sorry to disappoint you. It looks as if you were trying to detonate a pile of dud high explosives. Dr. Jay told us all about the construction of the device. He said that there was neither the time nor the opportunity to test the explosives and had relied on the promises you and your friend Andreas made. Apparently the North Koreans had a good laugh when you handed over a huge sum of money for a few hundred kilograms of explosives that were no more energetic than candle wax. The hushed puff we all heard must have come from the detonators as they were the only thing that worked".
After two days of intensive interrogation Ollie revealed the whole plot. He admitted that the explosion of the U-233 improvised nuclear device was supposed to be the trigger that would set in motion the clash between Islam and the Western civilization, and more importantly a nuclear war between the West and the former Soviet bloc while also dragging the Chinese into the conflict. The expected outcome was to be total dominance of ISIS — the supporters of the true religion, in his words — who would emerge from the deserts of Iraq, Syria and Arabia and conquer the world, replaying the spread of Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries. David managed to draw out this confession by taunting Ollie and telling him that his IND would never have worked. Indeed, the team of experts had easily neutralized the trigger mechanism and on close examination found that the intense gamma radiation damaged the high explosives to an extent that would have thrown off the timing preventing a true simultaneous detonation. This would make the effect of the bomb similar to something between a small radiation dispersion device and a conventional high explosives bomb. In other words, David explained to Ollie, all his efforts along with the millions of dollars spent and the cost in human lives, would have been about equal to the effect of an amateur teenager producing a peroxide bomb in his bath tub based on instructions downloaded from the Internet. This so enraged Ollie that David thought for a moment he would have a seizure and die on the spot, thus escaping justice.
The celebration was not exuberant and attended only by the chiefs of the Israel Security Agency, the Israel Atomic Energy Commission and Mossad and a few senior managers from these government agencies. The Prime Minister himself was there to personally thank the people responsible for preventing the catastrophe that could have occurred if Ollie had succeeded. As usual, the speeches were short and except for the PM only the current Deputy Director, and soon to be the new chief of Mossad spoke. Haim Shimony gave the short version of the events that led to the capture of Ollie and to the dismantling of the improvised nuclear device and commended David Avivi for his exceptionally astute coordination of the hunt to neutralize the most dangerous threat to the State of Israel and perhaps to the entire Western Civilization. No one mentioned that the difference between success and failure of Ollie's mission was so small that there must have been some divine intervention to correct the stupid errors of judgment made by humans.
David made an announcement telling everybody that the uranium-233 had been recovered and its decay product actinium-225 would be used as a source for bismuth-213 to be deployed to treat cancer. He proudly said that this was a demonstration of Isaiah's biblical prophecy: "they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks". He then boarded a flight to Vienna to inform his colleagues of the International Task Force in person about the latest developments, and to spend a well deserved week long vacation with Orna.
Acknowledgments
There are many books that are published every day on Amazon Kindle and it is easy to get confused and not see the trees in the forest. For unknown authors, who are not famous, the best way to stand out from the crowd is to have their book reviewed by the people who read them, and hopefully enjoyed them. So, please write a review, an honest review, and post it on the Amazon website.
First and foremost I would like to thank you for reading this book. I hope you enjoyed it despite the scientific jargon that I really tried to minimize.
I dearly appreciate your comments, so please send them to: charleszdavid1@gmail.com
This book would not have been possible without the help of Dr. Wikipedia and Professor Google. I also found a wealth of information in the 8 volumes of "Swords of Armageddon — US nuclear weapon secret history" by Chuck Hansen, in Carey Sublette's chapters on "Nuclear weapons" and in the book entitled "Nuclear forensic analysis — Second edition" by K. J. Moody, P. M. Grant and I. D. Hutcheon from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I also learned about the development of nuclear devices from Richard Rhodes' two books "The making of the atomic bomb" and "Dark sun". However, any misinterpretation of the technical and geographical information from those sources is my own responsibility. I have also found inspiration in several other scientific publications and textbooks but I alone can be held accountable for any conclusions that I may have drawn from them. Needless to say that no one has produced fissile uranium-233 by gamma irradiation of thorium and any serious physicist would immediately tell you that it is impossible in the real world. However in a book of fiction anything is possible as you have witnessed. As a chemist, a real one not an alchemist, I am happy that the dreadful alchemist turned out to be a physicist and not one of us.