Cyborg 02 - Operation Nuke

by Martin Caidin

“For one thing, the system of controls, of monitoring. It—”

  “Isn’t foolproof, by any means,” Goldman broke in. “Forgive me, Steve, but I’m afraid a crash course in reality is in order.”

  “Go ahead,” Steve said, feeling a sudden weariness from the foreknowledge that he was going to be led into something he liked less with each of Goldman’s words.

  “Right now the United States has in its inventory something like fifty thousand atomic weapons of all kinds,” Goldman continued. “That’s every type of warhead you can think of, from the big hydrogen bombs we carry in our planes to the smallest weapons for battlefield use. Warheads for air-to-air missiles, for artillery, for battlefield missiles. Thousands of these are small, efficient, and powerful. You said yourself that one FB-111 could carry three thermonukes with a total yield of thirty-six million tons of TNT. Okay, and the smaller weapons have anywhere from a kiloton on up. The key here is that were talking about nukes that are small in physical size. Some of these things could fit into a cookie jar.

  “Now think about where these nukes go. They’re all over the world. They’re stored at various military bases. When you have that many nukes in so many places, you tend to become vulnerable in your security, and sooner or later you lose some. How many have been lost at sea because of planes going down from engine trouble or some other reason? And how many of those bombs were recovered without our knowing about it? Take a big army base somewhere in Europe, nuclear warheads on the premises. The oufit moves, or there’s a fire, records lost, destroyed or stolen, and in the end no one is absolutely sure some of these weapons aren’t missing.”

  “Not sure? About nukes? That I still find hard to believe.”

  “Believe it. And even if we didn’t face the problem of numbers, we know about certain weapons being stolen. We know of raids by persons or groups unknown against certain storage areas. And then there’s the problem of a few of our own people defecting, and taking one or more bombs with them. It isn’t that hard, Steve, when a man can put a warhead into an attaché case and desert. If he can sell that nuke, he’d have enough money to change his name and appearance and buy his way to a life of luxury. It’s happened, Steve. Not only to us but to the Russians. We said before we’ve been working closely with them because we’re equally vulnerable.”

  “It’s another reason,” McKay broke in, “why the explosion of one or even more atomic bombs would no longer precipitate a war between the major powers. We know and they know, and this includes most governments, that there’s more than a few of these things around. It’s strange, but in a way the knowledge that there have been losses of these weapons to the black market has helped prevent atomic war between the major powers. Someone might threaten to set off a nuclear blast in even a major city and it wouldn’t automatically—as in the early post-World War II days—be assumed it was a hostile government; the ultimate blackmail could also be in the hands of these international gangsters. That’s why our people in Washington, their people in Moscow, London, Paris, and elsewhere, have at least tacitly agreed that no one reacts automatically any more.”

  Steve shook his head slowly. “The idea of losing actual warheads seemed far-fetched to me. But I’ve got to admit that even if bombs weren’t missing, it’s possible for trained people to make their own bombs. Breeder reactors produce fissionable material as a waste product from turning out electricity. You can take this waste product and make your own bombs. And they make a special problem all their own.”

  Now McKay looked confused.

  “Anything you in effect build at home,” Steve went on, “has got to be a radioactively dirty bomb.

  “A couple of us, in fact, built our own atomic bomb as part of a research project, and it wasn’t that big a deal. Take the breeder reactor I mentioned. You use the breeder to produce commercial electricity. The last time we looked at the figures there were some five hundred reactors already built or under construction in something like seventy different countries. They have differences in design, of course, but they all work on the same principle. You burn natural or slightly enriched uranium in the reactor, it produces tremendous heat, the heat is cycled through a closed loop system to produce electricity. But as you burn the uranium fuel you’re modifying it, and what comes out as a waste product is plutonium. Once you have the basic material, the plutonium, the rest is pretty much a matter of mechanical and electrical hardware. Six kilograms of plutonium and a machine shop and you’re in business.”

  “My God,” McKay said. “You mean it takes only fourteen pounds of the stuff to—”

  “That’s for an inefficient, clumsy, homegrown bomb,” Steve said.

  “Let’s hear more about how you made yours,” McKay said.

  “We didn’t use actual plutonium. No need to be that realistic, not at first, anyway. There are two types of bombs you can build. The shotgun—which is what we used at Hiroshima—and the implosion weapon, which was used at Nagasaki and is far more complicated in its design and construction. With the right materials, any good machine shop or laboratory can build either weapon, but we stuck with the easy one. The basic idea is to separate your main pieces of plutonium. The optimum shape is a sphere. We worked with lead, but it adds up the same. We cut the lead sphere so that one shape was a wedge, and the other, or receiving end, had an indentation of exactly the right size to receive the wedge. When you brought them together they formed a sphere. The trick is to keep the two pieces apart so they won’t form a critical mass.”

  “Which is?” McKay said.

  “In pure form, anything over twelve pounds.”

  “And if you have critical mass, as you call it—”

  “More properly called the K-factor,” Steve said.

  “And if you bring together your plutonium to form a critical mass, what happens?”

  “You get yourself an atomic bomb. The plutonium is always undergoing some fission. But since it’s not in a critical mass, the neutrons escape and there’s no danger. But if you get two subcritical masses near each other, the fission rate goes up, you get tremendous heat and radiation. The whole mechanism would melt before you could ever get the bomb. So you bring the two slugs together as fast as possible and keep them there for a fraction of a second before the whole thing blows apart.

  “We used a machine shop to build a grooved barrel. The plutonium slugs were at each end, fitted to rods that in turn fitted to the grooves. We built a ripple-fire series of explosive charges at the end of the barrel that contained the wedge. Then, for good measure, we added a small rocket motor that fired a fraction of a second after the explosive charges were set to go off. It was triple redundancy to assure that the whole mess would come together. The rocket was added insurance if the explosives didn’t work as intended.”

  “What about the materials for the mechanism?” McKay asked. “Where did you get those?”

  “Hardware stores, mainly.”

  “Stock items?”

  “Stock items. What hardware didn’t carry, we got in special machine shops. Remember, they build things for cars, airplanes, skin divers, and anybody else who comes along. No way to figure a bomb was being built.”

  “How did you set it off?”

  “Radio signal detonator as primary. Time-signal charge as backup.”

  “Any special problems?”

  “Yes,” Steve said. “Plutonium is corrosive. The surface comes apart quickly. So we built in humidity and temperature control. In fact, the bomb was the easiest part. The auxiliary equipment took the most time and trouble.”

  “The weight?”

  “We surprised ourselves,” Steve said. “Nine hundred and forty-six pounds on the nose. Not bad, when you consider the Hiroshima bomb weighed ten thousand pounds. But we didn’t have to drop ours from a plane, we didn’t bother with the barometric pressure or impact detonators and the other systems they used for the air drop.”

  “How big?”

  “Four feet long by seventeen inches wide.”

 
“I thought,” McKay said, “your bomb was a dummy only. Now you imply it worked.”

  “It did. The weapons lab people were running a more realistic test than we knew. They took our bomb, substituted plutonium for the lead we used, stuck it in a hole in the test grounds, and set it off.”

  From McKay, “And?”

  “Twenty-two thousand tons of explosion.”

  Through dinner in McKay’s office Steve argued that his personal experience with nuclear weapons was hardly unique, that there were plenty of people who knew more and had done more, including “people who assemble them, work on their design, tear down and service them.” Except none of these people had his special qualities and training, and the very fact of the loose situation in the control of nukes, feasibility of stealing or even fashioning them from obtainable fissionable materials and hardware all made plausible the concept of an organization that exploited this situation. But the way McKay and Goldman now developed it with Steve it became much more than a concept.

  “Suppose you’ve been able to create a strong international organization whose intent is criminal and whose façade is respectable. We’re talking about millions of dollars worth of equipment, facilities, organization.”

  “So you don’t bother robbing banks,” Steve said.

  McKay nodded. “You go for bigger game. You have one item to sell that could justify your tremendous investment. But having something that expensive to sell restricts the range of potential customers. A government, for example. One political group trying to overthrow another. Let’s say your item is a nuclear device. You also offer for hire your services in providing such devices where and when needed.”

  “Which means you may not ever set them off,” Steve said slowly. “Because if you can convince the other guy you have the nukes where you say they are, and can detonate them when you want to . . .”

  “Except you must be prepared to prove your point,” McKay added. “The best bluff is one you’ve proved you can back up if necessary. Now, given the organization and what it does, including dealing in nuclear devices, would you use the so-called basement bomb for your business?”

  Steve thought about that. Any such organization, to operate successfully, would need freedom of movement, which meant not being tied town to cumbersome procedures or equipment. And the so-called basement bomb was clumsy, oversized, and very heavy. Okay if you were trying to start a revolution on a one-shot basis, but not for long-range planning by the international organization described by McKay.

  “If you build your own bomb,” Steve said, “you’ve got a whole bagful of problems. First, you’re going to have to move the thing. That involves shock absorbers and the equipment to monitor the internal systems of the device. And that in turn adds to the complexity of a portable power source for just this one purpose, even if you’re using batteries you throw away. The point is that with any crude device the problems of having the thing ready for immediate use are huge.

  “Also, if its the kind of package you build with a home workshop or even with a professional shop—we’re talking about something less than a really pro weapons lab—you’re never going to get the kind of seals you need for effective humidity and temperature control. And you need that kind of sealed control, because temperature changes can cause metal to shrink or expand, and the same goes for plastics or other materials, and you can end up with a hell of an expensive dud. So again you end up needing a portable power source to handle such problems.

  “This is why that first bomb, the one we used in Japan, was so damned big and cumbersome. Another problem in mobility is your external casing. Do you want to drop the thing from a plane? Or do you want to get it into a harbor with a ship? And the more complicated you get, the more I suppose you risk exposure. Let’s say you want to set the thing off from a distance. Is it electrical? Do you tie in to a local power source? Maybe you drag it into a city with a truck. But it’s too dangerous to leave it there, so you move it from the truck to an apartment, or a store. You’ve got to be sure it’s well hidden, and you’ll need antennas and all kinds of radio gear to get the right signal to set it off—if it’s a radio signal you want to use, which is the safest way. And all these things mean weight, complexity, cumbersome gear on your hands. It’s got to be at best a one-shot effort.”

  “He’s right,” Goldman said. “You could get away with this maybe once or twice, but not much more.”

  “Well, even if they aren’t caught right away,” Steve added, “it wouldn’t be hard to track them down. Any time you set off a basement nuke you’ve got a dirty bomb. Dirty in radioactivity. Any cloud from the bomb has traces of the original materials, and you know the experts can break down those traces and give you damn near everything but the fingerprints of the people who put the thing together.”

  “What if it’s a professional weapon?” McKay asked.

  “You can still trace the elements from sampling the radioactive cloud,” Steve said, “but it might not do much good. I assume you’d be dealing with smart professionals who knew what they were about. The bomb they’d use could be easily transported in a sealed system. The only maintenance to worry about would be taken care of in some secret or disguised facility that was fully equipped.”

  “How long can you work with one of these sealed units without maintenance?”

  “I guess with the smaller bombs you could go months without much trouble.”

  “Smaller bombs?” McKay’s eyes were intense.

  Steve was reluctant to say it. “You can carry a one-point-one megatonner in a large attaché case.”

  “One million tons in an attaché case?”

  “One million one hundred thousand tons yield. We’ve had them for years.”

  “What about a really small bomb?”

  “A hundred kiloton bomb—five times more powerful than the bomb we used at Hiroshima—is about the size of a kitchen toaster.”

  “Well,” McKay said. “We definitely are in trouble, because those are the weapons that appear to be up for sale. And from what we’ve been able to learn so far a service goes along with purchase of the weapon.”

  “You’ve got proof of this?”

  “Proof is for juries. You decide for yourself.” McKay reached into a desk drawer and tossed a thick document onto the desk. “This is a collection of intelligence reports from every security agency in the country. Some of them you’ve never heard of. Also from Russian agencies. They all point convincingly to an international group dealing in stolen nuclear weapons.

  “But, like you say, it’s not proof,” McKay added, “and we go just so far by conventional investigation and even less far in effective follow-up—without concrete, on-the-spot evidence. We’re pretty much convinced that there’s an organization that operates internationally or that’s been set up for some time and is about to begin operation any minute. And not only with nuclear weapons. Apparently they offer complete paramilitary services to paying customers.”

  Goldman added, “They’ve got a superb organization. So good we haven’t been able to learn much more than that they exist. They’re so powerful that certain governments are willing to provide complete seclusion and anonymity for them in return for pay and special protection.”

  “What about the CIA?” Steve asked.

  “They’ve lost fourteen people to date,” McKay said.

  “Fourteen experienced people,” Goldman added. “Perhaps a hundred more local agents in different parts of the world. Military intelligence has lost another twenty or thirty. As you can see, sending out agents to nail down the information we want doesn’t seem to work very well.”

  Steve sighed. “All right, let’s hear it.”

  Goldman began: “You’re the best chance we have. With your special talents, especially your background as a pilot and as someone who’s worked with nuclear weapons you—”

  “I get the picture, Oscar.”

  “We want you to infiltrate this organization. You’re known all over the world as the man who
commanded the last flight to the moon.”

  “Which would set me up, I should think, as the perfect target.”

  “We’ve worked it out,” McKay broke in. “Look, you know what’s at stake. You know why you’ve got the best chance to do what the others couldn’t. And if that isn’t enough, then I suggest you remind yourself what you just told us about looking at this blue planet earth from a quarter of a million miles away, and what atomic bombs can and will do to it.”

  Steve Austin had no answer to that. It was a case of eating his own words.

  CHAPTER 4

  At the hidden airfield twenty miles beyond Fort Dauphin on Malagasy, everything was ready. Sam Franks had said wheels up at six-thirty sharp. Five minutes before deadline the swept-wing jet was at the runway, engines idling, all clean and ready in the cockpit. For this flight Franks would fly as copilot in the right seat. He preferred the man at his left to be concerned with the exact distance for take-off calculated in terms of weight, temperature, density, altitude.

  Nothing was left to chance. The winds aloft at succeeding levels of 3,000 feet were known all the way to 45,000 feet, above which there were no standard reports. No matter; they’d determine that information from their onboard inertial computer system as they climbed. The pilot in the left seat, had he not been thoroughly familiar with Sam Franks as a pilot, would never have known that every detail had been checked out and evaluated by Franks. No wonder. It hadn’t been that many years since Franks had flown B-52 and B-58 bombers for the Strategic Air Command. Any man once singled out by General Curtis LeMay as the top bomber jock in SAC had to be in a class all his own. Those who flew with or for Sam Franks did so with a fine cutting edge.

  Thirty seconds before six-thirty the de Havilland DH-125 rolled out onto the runway, pointed directly down the long strip. The brakes locked. With five seconds to go the engines screamed at takeoff power. Exactly at six-thirty the pilot chopped the brakes free and the airplane surged forward, accelerating with a thundering rush. On each side of the runway, cut from heavy forest, thousands of birds took to the air with frightened cries, casting mottled shadows through the sun still low on the horizon. And then the plane was gone, leaving behind a thin booming cry drifting away like final ripples on a lake.