Cloudburst

by Pearson, Ryne Douglas

  Vishkov? “He designs nuclear weapons and offers the plans up for sale to terror groups and nutcakes. His real claim to fame goes back to his days with the SRF. He did a great deal of work on dirty bombs. Those are the old atomic bombs that are primarily fission weapons. He was trying to perfect area-denial weapons, ones that would make an area so hot nothing could enter it. It wasn’t anything new, just a routine R&D program to improve what they already had. Unfortunately for just about everyone but himself he stumbled onto something. Do you want the technical rundown or the abridged version?”

  Bud figured a mix would be proper. “How about something up the middle.”

  “Okay.” Joe slid forward in his chair. “A pad of paper?” The NSA handed him one. He spent a few seconds drawing as Bud leaned in to see. Landau strained through his bifocals to watch the diagram take shape. “This is roughly what Vishkov came up with.”

  “Little Boy,” Bud said. He had seen the thing before, in what book he didn’t remember. It was very similar to the ‘Little Boy’ gun bomb weapon that fell on Hiroshima. Simpler than the implosion-type bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the gun bomb was basically a large gun barrel with a uranium target at one end and a smaller uranium ‘bullet’ at the opposite end. Upon detonation the bullet was fired into the target, compressing the uranium to a supercritical state and causing the nuclear explosion.

  “Good call,” Joe said. He was getting a little irritated. So far this didn’t sound like any kind of ‘situation.’ It was sounding like a waste of time. Every so often some government official would want to know something related to his unique line of work. Since he was the senior member of NEST, DOE’s Nuclear Emergency Search Team, the PR and legislative appeasement duties usually fell to him. “He took the fairly easy to construct gun bomb design and made it easier to build, and increased the low-range relative yield twofold. Taking the reduction in size—compared to the Hiroshima weapon—into consideration, we have an extremely dangerous weapon when in the hands of terrorists. That’s his market.”

  “How did he accomplish this?” Bud asked.

  “This.” Joe’s finger touched the area of the uranium target. “The major problem with the gun bomb was the large amount of fissile material needed to make it work, and the fact that it had to be highly enriched material: usually uranium 235. That isotope occurs only in quantities of less than one percent of mined natural uranium, so you either have to enrich what you have or process enough to ‘make’ U235. Neither is cheap or easy. What Vishkov did was discover a way to aid the compression of a smaller amount of U235 by placing this uniform explosive band around the center section of the target. When the uranium bullet strikes the target there is usually some deformation of the fissile core as it tries to expand outward, like this.” Joe drew several arrows going out from the target. “This ‘explosive doughnut’ is triggered by the melding of the bullet into the target. The target itself is a section of a cylinder with a portion in the center coned out—that’s the bullet. When the bullet is fired and fills this conical hole, the doughnut around the cylinder blows and further compresses the target. Vishkov used a simpler aspect of the implosion method to increase the density of the target while the bullet pushed into it. He also used laser switches to time the firing. You see, all the firings have to be timed right on the money. The bullet has to impact the target perfectly and the compression of the cylinder must, absolutely must occur nanoseconds before impact.” Joe noticed the NSA go wide-eyed. “Look, basically what Vishkov did was take the best parts of the implosion and gun bombs and combine them, and somehow it’s easier to make than either of them separately.”

  It was explained as asked. Bud expected that he should have gotten the full gist of it, but he didn’t. This nuclear netherworld stuff scared him, more so because he knew too little about the mechanics of weapons. His job had been developing aircraft that could get the bombs to their targets. What went in the bomb bays was someone else’s worry.

  Anderson felt the silence. “Look, I’ve given this rigmarole twenty or thirty times to generals, secretaries, and anyone else who wanted a little ‘in’ knowledge. It’s my job to do this, but I also have other, more important things to do. I have a shipment of plutonium from France to Japan leaving in less than a week, and I am supposed to coordinate security with the Japanese. It may not seem like much to you, but there will be enough material on that freighter for a hundred bombs, so if you have no more—”

  “Captain Anderson,” Bud cut him off, “what we have here is an immediate threat.” He was upset at the disregard Anderson was exhibiting and, for the first time in days, felt the stubbornness of his years surface. “Please watch.”

  The recording was already queued up and began to play at the touch of the remote. The men watched a few minutes—Bud and the DCI for the third time in as many hours—as the boxes were loaded on the aircraft. Bud turned off the video player.

  “Captain, that happened in Libya, at Benina International Airport. The aircraft is a 747 that was hijacked out of Athens early this morning. Just prior to what you watched, the aft cargo hold was emptied; just after that, the door opened and some probable unfriendlies boarded.” Bud took a folder from his desk top. The photos inside had arrived from Fort Belvoir just minutes before Anderson’s arrival. “Please take a look at these. They’re enhanced.”

  Joe took the small stack. Fifteen photos. He looked through them quickly a first time, then more closely a second, discarding all but three of the eight-by-tens onto a side table. Two were good angle views of the boxes which could be useful for scale calculations. The third...

  “I know you can’t tell much from these,” Bud said, “but we have to ask the obvious: Could the Libyans have constructed a weapon using Vishkov’s design?”

  “If they had the design it might—”

  “They do,” Bud interjected.

  Joe was quiet for a few seconds. He searched both men’s eyes for the truth, not expecting to get it directly from their words. “How?”

  “One set got by us,” Landau answered. “A few years ago in the Netherlands. The IRA bought it at auction for Qaddafi.”

  “I don’t... Don’t you guys think I should know this stuff, that my team has a legitimate reason to be informed? For Christ’s sake... We don’t spend every damn day running around looking for friggin’ atom bombs in country. Ninety percent of our job is security—nuclear security.” The furrows on his forehead deepened, coming together just between his eyebrows. He scratched his brow with one finger. “So Qaddafi has a set of Vishkov’s designs. Is it the same design as the one we have?” At least they showed me that one.

  “We don’t know,” the DCI answered.

  Bud gathered the discarded photos and put them in the folder, placing it back on his desk. “You said if they had the design...”

  Joe swallowed hard. “Then things would be much simpler for them.”

  “Could they build it?” Bud pressed.

  “Not likely. Not with their resources.”

  “They have access to the technology, don’t they?” Landau inquired.

  “Except for the most important part: the fissile material. Or at least the right kind.” Joe was unsure, unsettled by this. The picture. “Weapons-grade material for this kind of device, like I explained before, would need to be either highly enriched uranium—around ninety percent U235—or plutonium 239. The Libyans have no plutonium.”

  “None?”

  “Absolutely none, Mr. DiContino. Your business may not allow you to make one hundred percent assured statements, but mine does. Plutonium is not found—it’s made. Processed. And damn tightly controlled. The Libyans do not have the capacity to ‘cultivate’ or refine P239.”

  “What about uranium?”

  Two sets of eyes bored into Joe. “As I said, they have none. Just highly enriched uranium for...” The picture!

  “What?” Bud saw doubt.

  Anderson looked again at the third photo. It is.

  Bud slid his chair clo
ser. It was the enhanced blowup of one of the officers around the plane. Nice of him to look up. “What is it?”

  “His name is Ibrahim Sadr. Captain’s rank. He runs the Libyan research reactor at Tajoura. It’s a small ten-megawatt job. The Soviets built it in the late seventies, early eighties. It started up in eighty-one.”

  Everyone was wondering the obvious. Bud did so aloud. “Could the reactor fuel be used for the weapon?”

  “It’s not likely.”

  It wasn’t convincing. “That’s not good enough. We have to know. Where’s the hundred percent assurance?”

  Joe had to admit that had been a bad way to characterize the usual certainty with which he could do his job. “No one has ever tested Vishkov’s design. It’s only theoretical, but it should work. He figured that, and so do I. But it still needs highly enriched uranium.”

  “You said—”

  “—it needs ninety percent or higher concentrations to work.” Joe paused. Could it?

  “Your expression worries me,” Bud admitted.

  “Me too,” the DCI agreed. “Could the weapon work with a lower percentage?”

  “I don’t know.” The face stared up at Joe from the photo. “It shouldn’t. The only way to know without a doubt is to test it, and we can’t do that. I could make a million sets of calculations and there would always be a plus or minus four percent error, up or down, on either end of the performance scale. That four percent could be the range of error Vishkov made allowances for if he calculated for a lower percentage concentration of U235. The fuel for Tajoura is seventy to seventy-five percent enriched uranium. You’d need to implode that concentration to get it to the point of supercriticality, unless Vishkov’s bomb increases the artificial density enough. I wish I knew, but I don’t.”

  “Then it is possible, yes?” Bud asked.

  Joe hesitated only a second. “Yes.”

  For Bud the contemplation was over. He had his answer, and with that answer he reaffirmed decisions he had already made. Dear God. “Captain Anderson, could you defuse such a weapon?”

  “If it’s on that plane and you can get me to it, yes. I’ve done it before.”

  “We have to assume it is.”

  “Joe, if you could ask Sadr any questions, what would they be?” Landau inquired, pointing to the tablet of paper. “Be simple and brief.”

  Anderson allowed a hidden smile inside. “You guys have someone everywhere.”

  “That’s not your concern,” Bud reminded him.

  Joe grunted. There wasn’t much to think about. The questions were simple. He scribbled them on the lined paper, then tore off the sheet and handed it to the DCI.

  “You’re leaving from Andrews in an hour,” Bud informed Joe.

  “Only the secretary of Energy can activate my team.”

  Bud no longer felt like being polite. “We are on the same side, Captain. Now, if you want, I’ll get the secretary on the phone and he can tell you personally. Or, I can go upstairs and get the president to sign the order. In either case you will be going—alone.”

  “What?”

  Bud was struggling with the security aspect of the situation. “Do you have to have your team? If not absolutely, then it’s solo.”

  Joe would rather have a five-person team with him, but why protest? The NSA had obviously seen his file—the classified one—which told him that he had worked alone on his biggest job. “Whatever you say.”

  “Good. Gather up whatever you need. The driver who brought you will see you to the field.” Bud thought Anderson looked less than pleased. He left immediately, with no goodbye or parting words.

  Herb Landau tucked the sheet of paper in his inside pocket. He stood up with a shove of his arms on the chair. The suit felt baggy. It had to be more noticeable.

  Bud stood, too, pinching his lips with two fingers. “He’s a little arrogant, Herb. I’m not sure I like him.”

  “You don’t have to like him, son. Get used to it. You’ll work with more assholes than a proctologist if you stay in D.C. for a while.”

  Bud opened the door for the DCI.

  “Besides, he’s damn good at what he does.”

  “He must be,” Bud replied, thinking a second later, to himself: He better be.

  London

  “Don’t worry,” the ordnance expert assured the Scotland Yard officer. “Putty.”

  The inspector assigned to the Domestic Terrorism Desk squeezed the material between his fingers. It felt much like his little girl’s modeling clay after it had sat out for a day or two, but not as flaky. There was a detonator—a mock one—protruding from the block of putty, obviously used to simulate explosives. The ordnance boys had dissected the explosive device, which turned out to be a harmless replica of the one that had all but destroyed a building less than a kilometer from where the fake was found. This was according to a note found with it. Trusting terrorists, the inspector had learned, could be deadly. But this seemed to be different: It was a warning.

  “So our friends have a rather clever gadget here, do they?” the inspector commented. He was looking for a more descriptive outline of the explosive-laden vest that lay sliced open on the table. Several of the large pockets were open to view, and certain wires were neatly snipped at the points where they exited the pockets on the front and sides of the canvas garment.

  “It seems so, sir. Eight pockets, each containing three pounds of high-explosive plastique. I don’t think we need to doubt that they have the real thing.” He poked the block of putty which approximated the size and weight of each pocket’s contents.

  “Any more?”

  “Well, the triggering mechanism is quite sophisticated. A deadman’s switch—this thumb switch, here.” He pressed it down, and released it, demonstrating its use. “If the chap holding this lets go—boom. Interrupter switches on each separate block of plastique. If a wire or wires are cut—boom. If the power is lost—boom. The only way to deactivate the thing is this.” The ordnance man pulled a small metallic box from the top left pocket. It had three red rocker switches on top and a rubber coated conduit running from the bottom to the other wire bundles. “We cut this conduit and the ones running from pocket to pocket. It’s green wire to one terminal, then red to another—no consistency. And in addition there are secondary links to the charges. There are these individual wires from the switch box to each charge, and a loop conduit from the box to number one, from there to number two, and so on. No dice cutting or defusing. Only the proper positioning of these switches will safe it.”

  “Is it a onetime safe?”

  “No. It can be engaged as often as desired. That way the chap doesn’t need to worry about getting his thumb tired.”

  The inspector raised his eyebrows. Behind his back his thumbs were grating against each other. “Damn hideous.”

  “Right.”

  “Our friends in America won’t be pleased to hear this.” And I have to be the bloody one to tell them!

  Pope AFB

  The crew of the huge green-and-black C-141B Starlifter sat in their seats, strapped in and ready to fire up the four turbojets if and when the word came. It hadn’t yet. They were no different from the ‘boys in black’ in that a go meant a chance to prove themselves. Their civilian superiors would deny that their troops harbored any such feelings, afraid that it might paint an unwanted Rambo image. Shortly another crew would come on station to relieve them, and again they would go to their bunks for another few hours of sleep.

  A quarter mile away the boys in black enjoyed no such respite. They sat on the wing of a loaned 747 in a massive hangar at the extreme east end of Pope Air Force Base. The aircraft, politely acquired from the airline, was configured identically to the interior of the Clipper Atlantic Maiden. Civilian carriers often lent aircraft to the military for counter-terrorist training. The airline, mindful that it was their aircraft on the ground in Libya, had called first to offer. The Clipper Angelic Pride arrived an hour earlier and was immediately moved into hangar 9.
Its crew and several engineers familiar with the 747-400 were ‘quarantined’ with the JSOC liaison team in the adjacent command post.

  Major McAffee stepped from the port number three door onto the wing. He was dressed in full assault gear, colored black, with a low holster on his right hip and a stubby MP5KA4 stockless submachine gun in hand. A black titanium helmet and attached respirator hung from a rubber hook on his web gear. The rest of the team looked much the same, bathed in an unusual orange glow from the reflection of the overhead lights off the pumpkin-colored walls.

  The eight men had just finished their first full-dress run- through of the aircraft, an activity designed to give them a look at the interior as they would see it in a real takedown, but having the added undesired effect of drenching them in their own sweat. No matter how light- or vapor-permeable their gear was supposed to be, it was never enough. Their sustained and rapid movement was part of the cause, but the stress was more of it. Even the mock takedown was stressful. It was supposed to be. The team had to psych up for a go, with no thought that they wouldn’t get it.

  “That’s the first one,” Blackjack said. “We’ll do at least two more, but first we’ve got some intel.” The men perked up at that. “It looks like at least four bad guys—maybe just that many. They probably have SMGs. We’re told they’re Uzis, and if they have those you can bet they have frags and pistols. Standard stuff. That’s the good news. British Intelligence gave us some stuff through 22 SAS about twenty minutes ago.” He didn’t mention that the information had been forwarded surreptitiously to Delta from their SAS counterparts ahead of the official message. That was probably still in the Pentagon. Not everything had changed. “There was a blast in London earlier today and an inert duplicate of the bomb was left close by.” McAffee explained the specifics of the device, as the British had determined, and contents of the note left with it. “So the head bad guy is wearing this thing. All he has to do is release the switch.”