There proved to be little reason to continue beyond the threshold. The chamber was impassible, almost completely filled with a haphazard arrangement of metal vats. Some of the enormous containers were secured to floor along the perimeter, but most had simply been shoved in hastily. Kismet instantly recognized the tanks and divined their diabolical purpose.
“Well, either we’ve stumbled upon Saddam’s answer to Anhauseur-Busch…” He trailed off in response to the blank looks he was receiving from his comrades. “They’re fermenters,” he explained. “A sealed environment where bacterial cultures can thrive and propagate. You use them in the final stage of brewing beer.”
Chiron nodded in dawning comprehension. “Ah, of course. Dual-use technology.”
“Exactly. You can also grown and harvest any number of bacteriological strains. Anthrax comes to mind.”
“Then this is a bio-weapons laboratory,” Marie gasped. “This is what UNMOVIC was looking for: proof of an ongoing program for weapons of mass destruction.”
Kismet glanced around again. “I’m not sure ‘laboratory’ is the right word. It doesn’t look like any of the equipment has ever been used. More likely this is the hole they shoved everything into so that the inspectors wouldn’t find anything.”
“Still, this would qualify as…what is your expression? A smoking gun, n’est pas?”
“That’s not for us to say,” reproved Chiron, but his tone and expression were distracted, as though the discovery was inconveniently timed. “But rest assured, we will report this to the correct agency. Come, let us continue looking. If they were using this place to hide secrets, then we may yet find the object of our search.”
The Frenchman again led the charge, forcing Kismet to hasten to catch up. The second opening, like the first, was equipped with an emergency gate. Beyond the doorway however, the scene was markedly different. The enclosure seemed to be a general storage area, and was cluttered with wooden crates and hard plastic shipping containers. The cartons rose before them like a wall, almost completely blocking access to the room beyond. Many of the boxes were stamped with stenciled Cyrillic characters, but a few were easier to decipher, with descriptions written in French, German and English. Without exception, the painted letters indicated the contents of the containers to be military munitions. A random inspection revealed only packing dunnage. “Just empty boxes,” Kismet observed. “Either this stuff was passed on to army units before the war, or it’s being stockpiled somewhere else by insurgents.”
“But why keep these?” inquired Hussein, gesturing with his bandaged hand at the pile of containers.
“I’d say this was their answer to throwing it away.”
“If I may,” Chiron interjected. “There may be another explanation. Camouflage.”
“You think there’s something behind all this refuse?” Kismet sighed and resignedly began shifting the cartons out of the way. It was painfully clear that the French scientist would not be satisfied until he had explored every possibility. Nevertheless, the stacked containers did look a little like a facade, set up to give the illusion that the space beyond was entirely filled up, and he wasn’t surprised at all when, after clearing three vertical layers out of the way, he revealed another laboratory workspace. He continued digging at the barrier until the opening was large enough for them to pass through single file.
The space that Kismet now thought of as “Laboratory Two” appeared to have nothing at all to do with the development of biological weapons. Rather, it looked more like a machine shop, with drill presses and metalworking lathes, and a large supply of metal ingots. He picked up one experimentally and found it to be lighter than expected. “Aluminum?” he speculated aloud. No one answered.
A large worktable occupied the center of the area, and spread out across its surface were the pieces to some kind of device. Kismet studied the fragments, trying to imagine what they would look like if assembled. A spherical casing in the middle of the puzzle gave it away.
He sucked in his breath suddenly and glanced at his companions. Both Marie and Hussein seemed only mildly curious about the items on the tabletop. He sensed no recognition from either of them. Chiron had given the device only a cursory glance before continuing his explorations, but Kismet wasn’t fooled. Chiron knew what it was. He had to know.
There were three hard plastic containers, each about half the size of a coffin, stacked at the end of the table. One was open, but the cavity inside was filled with packing foam, cut out to cradle a torpedo-shaped object. The exterior was marked with the seal of the French Ministry of Defense and what seemed to be an identification code: CER 880412. The other two cases were similarly labeled, though with a different six-digit code. Extruded plastic seals, resembling tiny yellow padlocks, were threaded through the clasps. These containers had never been opened.
Kismet nonchalantly moved closer to Chiron, who was presently examining the contents of a workbench. He kept his voice low. “There’s something over here you need to see.”
“The detonators?” Chiron seemed to understand the need for discretion. “I saw. Do not worry, my friend. They are not armed.”
“How can you tell?”
“Many years ago, my government foolishly agreed to exchange certain technologies for oil leases. It was their belief that the Iraqis would never be able to successfully reverse engineer the devices or refine the nuclear fuel to make them operational.” He gave a half-hearted smile. “In this at least, it would seem they were correct. Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program never got off the ground.”
Kismet realized that the object Chiron was inspecting was a partially assembled version of the same item that lay exploded on the table. But unlike the latter, this device seemed rougher at the edges. This fourth atomic detonator had been manufactured here in Laboratory Two, rather than in the Centre d’Etudes du Ripault.
Because he was a nuclear scientist, Chiron’s grasp of the intricacies both of atomic weapons and the politics of exchanging such technologies far outstripped Kismet’s, and the latter had no reason to question his old mentor’s appraisal. Nevertheless, the idea that he was looking at a nuclear bomb, or rather the detonator — the component that used a shaped charge of plastic explosives to bombard a core of plutonium with neutrons, thereby triggering a catastrophic fission reaction — was just a little unnerving.
Chiron turned away from the workbench. “This isn’t the relic we seek. Let’s continue looking, shall we?”
Their counter-clockwise circuit of the laboratory complex moved, not to the third such stainless steel room, but to a tunnel situated at the end of the rectangular cavern opposite where they had entered. After the artificial symmetry of the first two rooms, the passage through which they now moved seemed wholly organic, as if carved out by the forces of nature. It was in fact more likely that the original dimensions of a naturally occurring fissure had been improved with excavating tools and explosives. Yet the workers had not seen fit to work the walls smooth or bore the tunnel in a straight line. It wended back and forth, ascending steeply for more than one hundred meters, before emerging into a larger open chamber.
Kismet flicked off his flashlight and waited for the others to catch up before announcing: “I think we just found the back door to this place.”
The opening, through which indirect daylight was streaming in, was situated more than twenty meters off the cavern floor. It was large enough to fly a helicopter through, which apparently was exactly what someone had done. At the bottom of the chamber, hibernating like a tired old dragon, was a Russian-made Mi-25, NATO designation HIND D. A combination of gunship and transport, the Hind had gained recognition during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Beneath a five-bladed rotor, the Hind’s fuselage was aerodynamically thin, like the body of an insect, with stubby outriggers on either side — the wings of the wasp — supporting multiple weapons platforms.