He wondered what malignant alignment of the stars had been in play the night he had been born. No one, surely, deserved the kind of luck he was having.
A refugee from the utter horror and madness that was North Korea, he’d spent what felt like a lifetime serving one nuclear madman – North Korea’s Glorious Leader – only to end up working for another.
Of course, the money had been the draw. Wasn’t it always? If the money was right, you could get people to do just about anything.
Usually.
At first he’d been showered with comparative riches, which had been like a miracle. Too good to turn down. And now, as the saying went, he was in too deep. Over his head and drowning, you might even say.
Building an IND: at first it had been child’s play compared to what he had been tasked to achieve in North Korea’s nuclear programme. But then his boss had decided to change things; alter the plan in an act of self-proclaimed genius. Hubris, more like.
It had made Professor Pak Won Kangjon’s job a whole lot more difficult.
Kammler had added imponderables to the plan. The professor was an expert in nuclear weaponry, not nuclear power. He’d tried to explain the difference, but his boss wasn’t listening. No – it had to be his way or the highway, and Professor Kangjon had few illusions about what a dark and bloody end the highway might lead to.
It was all very well in theory, of course: hit a nuclear power station to achieve meltdown. Fine on paper. The ratchet effect. Use the power station’s stocks of uranium to multiply the destructive power of the IND’s blast, not to mention the radiation poisoning. Ratchet up the fear and the death factor.
Professor Kangjon had few reasons to lament the coming loss of life, incalculable though it would doubtless prove. So far as he knew, the populations being targeted were those that had mocked and emasculated his once great nation. His homeland. For at heart, the professor would always be a proud North Korean.
They’d openly laughed at his country’s Glorious Leader, otherwise known as the Great Leader Comrade, the Sun of the Communist Future and the Father of the People. Tauntingly, they’d christened him ‘Little Rocket Man’, ‘Kim Fatty the Third’, or even ‘Kim Fat Fat Fat’.
Well, it enraged Professor Kangjon. Those who belittled his homeland should be made to pay. They deserved to.
Why should he lift a finger to save them?
Yes, his boss’s idea was clever. Very clever. In theory. In practice, it hadn’t quite worked out that way, and mainly because he, Professor Kangjon, had screwed up the calculations – or at least he was pretty certain that he had.
To cause meltdown at a first-world nuclear power station, he’d presumed you’d have to overcome the same kind of safeguards – shields – as at a standard North Korean nuclear plant.
Wrong. You actually needed enough highly enriched uranium to punch through twice the level of protection, and that basically required twice the destructive power. So, not twenty kilos per device. Oh no. Forty kilos. Professor Kangjon now believed a forty-kilo charge was required to achieve meltdown at a nuclear power plant in Britain, France or the USA.
The specific reasons why were immensely complicated. Too complicated to explain to his boss. You needed a lifetime’s devotion to nuclear physics just to begin to understand the kind of complex theorems that were involved. But any minute now, his boss, Mr Hank Kammler – he’d tried to use a different name, Mr Helmut Kraft, but Professor Kangjon was too smart; he’d long figured out his real identity – was going to pay a visit to his laboratory, demanding answers.
The professor wasn’t looking forward to it, to put it mildly. He snapped in the air again with the chopsticks. Again he missed.
Behind him, a bank of giant 3D printers whirred away. Their steady beat was somehow reassuring. They were working to exacting digital plans inputted by Professor Kangjon, building up layer by layer the components required to smash two ten-kilo lumps of HEU against each other.
With his new calculations requiring a forty-kilo device, he’d need to alter the printer dimensions accordingly. No great drama. A little tweaking here and there, that was all.
It wasn’t re-engineering the components that worried the professor. It was explaining it all to Kammler. After all, three of the twenty-kilo devices had already been dispatched, and he figured it would be next to impossible to call them back again.
He’d suffered the full blast of his employer’s ire over the phone earlier, when he’d made the call to confess his mistake.
What was it going to be like up close and personal? He dreaded to think.
The door behind him opened. Professor Kangjon put down the chopsticks. He’d not caught his fly.
From the sound of the footsteps, he could tell that it was Kammler.
He spun around in his chair and got to his feet, a little unsteadily.
Kammler grinned.
Odd, that. The professor felt utterly thrown.
‘No need to get up.’ Kammler beamed his crocodile smile. It was taking a superhuman effort to mask his fury, but he was capable of it. Just. All necessary measures – whatever it took – to further the cause.
‘Please don’t unsettle yourself, Professor,’ he continued, through gritted teeth. ‘I need you calm and lucid to continue with your work. But just so we are clear: each device needs twice as much uranium? Am I right?’
‘Exactly, Mr… Kraft. I am so sorry for this recalculation…’
Kammler waved a hand impatiently. ‘These things happen at the cutting edge of science. So, if it’s forty kilos per device, we will need to utilise more HEU from the stocks we’re amassing. We should still have enough for the sacred eight.’ He eyed the professor. ‘But of course, I will need you to redouble your efforts.’
Professor Kangjon bowed stiffly – a bob of the head and shoulders. ‘Naturally, Mr Kraft. I would never give less than one hundred and one per cent. Perhaps if I might move my sleeping things into the laboratory?’
Kammler nodded curtly. ‘That would certainly aid the cause. Time is pressing, as always.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It is the fifth of April. Twenty-five days and counting. We must not miss the scheduled completion date. Do you understand?’
Professor Kangjon bowed more deeply this time. ‘Nothing will delay us, Mr Kraft, of that you have my solemn word. I will work my fingers to the bone, and the machines will run day and night to achieve this great and illustrious…’
But Kammler wasn’t listening any more. He’d already turned and stepped towards the door. His mind was crunching the numbers. With the amount of HEU they’d amassed already and the incoming flight from Colombia, they should have enough at a stretch. But the North Korean professor would have to pay, of course. This was unforgivable, and the bastard would have to be made to suffer. Probably a job for Steve Jones. Yes, Jones. But first, let Kangjon work his fingers to the bone: fear would make him doubly diligent.
That was one of the major upsides of operating from a location such as this, Kammler reflected: scores of disaffected nuclear scientists on your doorstep. Most of them desperate for a way out and willing to work for peanuts. And most – like Professor Kangjon – nursing a bitter grudge against the world powers.
A grudge that Kammler was more than happy to harness to his own ends.
39
As Kammler stepped out of the lab’s front entrance, he caught sight of an arresting scene. To one side of the building a diminutive figure had been lashed to a post. A giant of a man pivoted this way and that, administering a punishment beating.
Even from a distance Kammler could hear the distinctive crunch as a blow from a massive fist shattered bone, though the victim was tightly gagged and thus unable to scream. Kammler smiled his approval. He didn’t want any cries of agony to unsettle the professor and his team. To disturb their vital work. But at the same time, he wanted the beatings carried out in public as a warning to any who might consider stepping out of line.