Zero Day

by David Baldacci

  “Wait a minute,” Puller finally said.

  With Cole in his wake he fast-walked to Annie’s Motel. Puller started kicking open doors. On the fifth Cole looked in the room and said, “Randy?”

  Her brother was lying fully clothed on the bed.

  Puller and Cole moved inside and Puller shut the door behind him. He flicked the light on.

  “Randy? Wake up.”

  The man did not move.

  Cole drew closer. “Is he okay? Randy?”

  “He’s fine. His chest is moving up and down.”

  Puller looked around, then said, “Wait a sec.”

  Puller grabbed an old bowl off a cracked wooden bureau and went into the bathroom, where Cole could hear water start to run. Puller came back out with a full bowl of water and threw it on Randy’s face.

  He shot up and then rolled off the bed. “What the shit!” screamed Randy as he hit the floor.

  Puller grabbed him by the back of his shirt, lifted him off the floor, and threw him back on the bed.

  As his eyes focused, Randy gazed at Puller and then saw his sister staring at him.

  “Sam? What the hell is going on?”

  Puller sat down next to him. “Bed better than bushes now?” he asked.

  Randy focused on him. “Was that water?”

  “How drunk are you?”

  “Not much. Not anymore.”

  “We need your help.”

  “’Bout what?”

  “The Bunker,” said Puller.

  Randy rubbed his eyes. “What about it?”

  “You got in there, right?”

  “What?”

  Puller gripped him by the arm. “Randy, we don’t have a lot of time and I can’t waste the time we do have trying to explain. We found a blueprint for the Bunker. On it, it said that there could be no mine blasting within two miles. The only reason they would have put that warning on there is if there had been a mineshaft already there or the potential of one. And they wanted to make sure that no one detonated explosives nearby. Your father was the best coal hunter around. And you worked with him. You probably know this county better than anyone. So is there a mineshaft that leads to the Bunker?”

  Randy rubbed his head and yawned. “Yeah, there is. Daddy and I stumbled on it one day. It was already there, of course. We were looking for something else entirely. It was really two mineshafts. We followed the first in and found a second that ran in that direction. Followed that for a while. Daddy figured we were under the Bunker at that point. And he was right. That shaft was probably there from the 1940s, Daddy thought.”

  “But did you get into it?” asked Puller.

  Randy looked sleepy again. “What? No, no, we didn’t. At least not at that point. I think Daddy was curious about it. He’d always told us stories about the Bunker. We talked some about getting in there. But then he got killed.”

  Randy drew a long breath and looked like he might be sick.

  “Just keep it together, Randy,” said Puller. “This is really important.”

  “After Daddy died, I went back in there and dug a little more. I found a side shaft. Then I let it be for a long time. Went off on some drinking binges. Started sending threats to that asshole Roger. Then about eighteen months ago I went back in there. I don’t know why. Maybe I was trying to finish something Daddy started. That’s when I found a way in. Took some finagling and some muscle, but within a couple of months I was in. They might’ve put that dome over the building, and there was a concrete floor, but the floor had cracked in places, probably where the dirt shifted. Maybe from them dynamiting for coal way off somewhere.”

  “So you got in. And what did you find?” asked Puller.

  “Big-ass place. Dark as a cave, of course. I looked around some. Saw some stuff. Workbenches, crap on the floor, some barrels.”

  “Barrels of what?”

  “Don’t know. Never looked that close.”

  Cole said, “Randy, that was dangerous as hell. That stuff in there could be toxic. It could be radioactive. Maybe that’s why you’ve been feeling like crap all this time. Headaches and all.”

  “Guess it could be.”

  “What else did you see in there?” asked Puller.

  “Nothing. I got the hell out. Place gave me the creeps.”

  “Okay, next big question. Did you tell anyone what you found?” asked Puller.

  “Nah. What for?”

  “No one?” said Puller. “You’re sure?”

  Randy thought for a minute.

  “I might’ve told somebody, come to think of it.”

  “Dickie Strauss?”

  Randy stared at him. “How the hell did you know that? We played football together. Used to hang out a lot. I was into the Xanadu thing for a while till I lost my bike to repo. Yeah, I told him. So? What does that matter?”

  “Dickie’s dead, Randy,” said Cole. “Somebody murdered him. And we think it has to do with the Bunker.”

  Randy sat up straighter, all alert now. “Somebody killed Dickie? Why?”

  Puller said, “Because he told someone else about the Bunker. And somebody got inside there too. And whatever they found is the reason all these people have been killed.”

  Randy said, “So what the hell is in there?”

  “That’s what I’m going to find out,” said Puller.

  “So you have any ideas?” asked Cole. “I mean about what’s in there?”

  “Yeah, I do,” replied Puller.

  “What?” asked Cole. “Tell me.”

  Puller said nothing. He just looked at her, his heart beating way too fast.

  CHAPTER

  83

  EVEN THOUGH IT WAS STILL EARLY in the morning in Kansas, Robert Puller didn’t sound particularly sleepy. The younger Puller didn’t think his brother slept much in USDB. He was a brilliant guy. And brilliant guys didn’t tend to sleep much in the outside world full of demands on their time and intellect. Puller figured they didn’t sleep much more when all they had to look at were three walls of concrete and a metal door that remained shut twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours of each day.

  “How you doing, bro?” said Robert.

  “I’ve been better and I’ve been worse.”

  “Balance is good in life.”

  “Ninety-two and ninety-four. What do they mean to you?”

  “Even numbers.”

  “Another perspective.”

  “Give me some context.”

  His brother sounded engaged now, instead of just curious.

  “Pure science. Your area of expertise.”

  Two ticks of the clock went by.

  “Ninety-two is the atomic number for uranium. Ninety-four is the atomic number for plutonium.”

  “That’s what I remembered too.”

  “Why?”

  “Hypothetical.”

  “Okay.”

  “What sort of uranium and plutonium would you need to build a nuke?”

  “What?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “What the hell are you involved in, John?”

  His brother did not often call him John. To his older sibling Puller was either “bro” or sometimes “Junior”—although lately the latter term had not been used by him very much because it was a reminder of their father.

  “Just give me your best answer.”

  “You need lots of things. Most you can obtain. Others you can build. If you have time and some expertise it’s not that hard. What’s hard to get is the nuclear fuel for the process. There’re only two that exist.”

  “Uranium and plutonium.”

  “Right. And you need highly enriched uranium, U-235 or HEU, to make a nuclear bomb. To do that you need a manufacturing facility, big bucks, lots of scientists, and a number of years.”

  “And plutonium?”

  “Should we be talking about this? They’re monitoring the call.”

  “Nobody’s listening, Bobby,” said Puller. “I made arrangements for this
to be private.”

  His brother didn’t say anything for a long moment.

  “Then I’d say whatever you’re involved in is way beyond a hypothetical.”

  “And plutonium?”

  “You get plutonium-239 mostly from radiating uranium in a nuclear breeder reactor. What you’re really doing is scrubbing out plutonium-240, which is abundant in reactor-grade plutonium but which can cause a fizzle when using it as a nuclear weapon.”

  “But again, tough to get.”

  “Impossible to get for the man on the street. Who has a nuclear breeder reactor in their backyard?”

  “But could you get it?”

  “I suppose you could steal it or buy it on the black market.”

  “How about in the U.S.? How do they make it?”

  “The only U.S.-owned gaseous diffusion plant is in Paducah, Kentucky. But that’s used to enrich uranium for fuel in nuclear reactors, totally different process.”

  “But could it be highly enriched by that process? To get it to be the fuel for a nuclear weapon?”

  “Paducah is set up to enrich uranium for use in nuclear reactors, not build the fuel for bombs.”

  “But could a plant like Paducah highly enrich uranium?” Puller persisted.

  “Theoretically, yes.” He paused. “Where exactly is all this going?”

  “How much U-235 would you need to build a bomb?”

  “Depends on what type of bomb and what type of method you’re using.”

  “Ballpark,” said Puller.

  “With a simple bomb design and a Nagasaki yield you’d need anywhere from fifteen to fifty kilograms of HEU or six to nine kilograms of plutonium. If your weapons program is super-sophisticated and your bomb design is perfect you could get the same boom with roughly nine kilos of HEU or as little as two kilos of plutonium.”

  “So Nagasaki?”

  “Yield equivalent to over twenty-one thousand tons of dynamite plus the radiation fallout kicker. That’s forty-two million pounds of TNT. Mass destruction.”

  “And a little more HEU or plutonium?”

  “Your results go up exponentially. It’s all in your bomb design. You can use the gun method, which is not good at all, although the first A-bomb dropped on Japan used that design. That’s basically a long tube. Half your nuclear charge at one end backed by a conventional explosive and the other half of your nuke fuel at the other end. The conventional explosives are detonated, it pushes the fuel down the tube where it hits the other half of the fuel, and you have your chain reaction. It’s crude, highly inefficient, and your explosive yield is severely limited. You’d need a tube of infinite length to sustain the chain reaction. And you can only use uranium, not plutonium, because of impurity factors. That’s why the industry moved on to the implosion method.”

  Puller said, “Give me the two-cent tour on the implosion method.”

  “You can use either uranium or plutonium. You basically use conventional explosives, called explosive lenses, to squeeze the pit where your nuclear fuel is located into a supercritical mass. The shock wave compressing the uranium or plutonium must be perfectly spherical, or the pit material will escape through a hole and you’ll end up with what’s called a fizzle. You also need an initiator, tampers and pushers, and ideally a neutron reflector to push neutrons back in the pit. The trick is to keep the pit from blowing apart too quickly, before you reach optimal supercritical mass. The longer the fission material is allowed to react, the more atoms are split and the bigger the boom. You can triple your explosive yield without a gram more of nuclear fuel if your design is good.”

  “What are some of the elements you’d need?”

  “Meaning what exactly?”

  “Talk to me about gold foil and tungsten carbide.”

  There was silence for three beats. “Why those two specifically? Do you know that they’re present in your case?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Talk to me, Bobby. I’m running out of time here.”

  “Gold foil can be used in the initiator component. You use a small sphere with layers of beryllium and polonium separated by gold foil. That’s placed in the center of the pit and is obviously a critical part of the design.”

  “And the tungsten carbide?”

  “It’s three times stiffer than steel and dense as hell and therefore works very well as the neutron reflector. That is to get the neutrons back into the pit to maximize the supercritical stage. Are you telling me that… Where the hell are you?”

  “In the U.S.”

  “How did they get the fuel?”

  “What if I told you there was a secret government facility operating in the 1960s that was closed a long time ago and a three-foot-thick dome of concrete was put over it, and the sucker was just left that way? All the workers at the plant were shipped in from outside and lived in a neighborhood right next to it. The workers were never allowed to talk about it with the local folks, and when the plant closed down they shipped all the workers off. Ring any bells? You were networked in tight with all this stuff when you were with the Air Force.”

  “Three feet of concrete?”

  “In a dome shape.”

  “Out-of-the-way place?”

  “As rural as they come. Entire population far less than one block in Brooklyn. Facility had its own fire department and I found a sheet of paper in there with the numbers 92 and 94 written on it. And I also found out that blasting for coal was not to take place within miles of the dome.”

  “They’re blasting near there? Are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s unbelievable. Even if you’re blasting miles away, there are bedrock fissures that can be weakened. That could be catastrophic.”

  “What about this facility?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t even alive in the 1960s.”

  “But if you had to guess. Based on your experience?”

  There was a long sigh. “If I were still in uniform I could never tell you this.” He paused. “I could be convicted of treason. But since I already have been convicted of treason, what the hell.” He paused again. “In the past I heard of early stage processing and enrichment plants that were built in rural America. This was post–World War II when the only thing that mattered was kicking the Soviet Union’s ass. These facilities were built to enrich uranium and also work with plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. Most if not all of them were closed down.”

  “Why?”

  “Their techniques were unstable or cost too much. It was an entirely new science. People were feeling their way, trial and error. Mostly error.”

  “Okay. They close down. They take all their stuff with them, right?” His brother didn’t answer. “Bobby? Right?”

  “If you took all your ‘stuff’ with you, would you build a three-foot-thick concrete dome to cover it up?”