The Silent Man jw-3

by Alex Berenson

  “Excuse me?” Now Davydenko did look surprised. “You have learned what?”

  “Someone—”

  “Who?”

  “I can’t say. But this person has offered several million dollars for a component of a nuclear weapon.”

  “What component?”

  “Again, I’m afraid I can’t tell you.” Purdy allowed himself to smile. For the first time in a year, he had something on these guys. “Ironic, isn’t it, that your government has been so uncooperative and yet you demand whatever scraps of information we have.”

  “What is ironic, Mr. Ambassador, is that you presume to come into the Kremlin and tell us how to run our own investigation. And that you have information you refuse to share. This is not the way friends treat each other.”

  “Are we friends?”

  “This is not the way great nations build trust.” Davydenko banged his fist on the table and the empty glass in front of Purdy jumped. “I ask again, do you have something to tell me?”

  “I will tell you that the person who is attempting to buy this component is not here in Russia.”

  “Do you have any reason to connect this person, assuming he exists at all, with our missing material?”

  Purdy hesitated. “Not at the moment.”

  “Not at the moment.” Davydenko spoke with the sarcastic tone that senior Russian officials seemed able to deploy at any time. “Perhaps the next moment, then? The one after that? Maybe tomorrow? Next week? Mr. Ambassador, did you decide on this fool errand yourself? Did you miss seeing me so much? You come in here, you waste my time with this nonsense, no proof—”

  “I speak for my government. And we want official assurance that you have full control of your arsenal.”

  “Then it’s your government that’s wasting my time.” Davydenko stood. “We answer to our own president. Not to yours. Do we come to the White House demanding that you confirm that your nuclear weapons are safe in their silos? Do we? Do you play these games with the Chinese or the French or the British?”

  “No.” Purdy knew he shouldn’t answer, but he couldn’t help himself.

  “Correct. Only us. Always you treat us like children. We would never behave with such insolence. Yet you, you come in here and — Let me give you a piece of advice, Mr. Ambassador. Drink your green tea and let us handle our investigation. As for this mythical person seeking this mythical component, if and when you decide to behave ethically and tell us what you know, I will be willing to listen.”

  “Is that your official response, then?” Purdy wished he could come up with something snappier, but at least he was holding his ground.

  “My official response is that I have business to attend to. My captain will show you out.”

  WHEN PURDY WAS GONE, Davydenko walked down the hall to Zubrov’s office, just outside the presidential suite, and relayed the conversation. Not that he needed to. The conference room was miked. Zubrov had been listening all along.

  “Goddamn bombs,” Zubrov said. “All these years we had all these missiles pointed at each other and nothing happened. We spent the fifties blowing up the Pacific, ten megatons at a time. Nothing. Now two assholes steal two two-hundred-kilo warheads and everything turns upside down. What do you think, General? This component, is it real?”

  “That little man is too weak to lie. And they wouldn’t have sent him unless they were worried.”

  “Then why won’t they tell us about this component?”

  “I think what he said is true,” Davydenko said. “They’re angry that we haven’t talked to them.”

  “If they only knew how little we’ve found.”

  “Is there anything new on that front?”

  “I wish.” The Russian investigation had stalled completely. No one in Chelyabinsk had any idea what had happened to the Farzadov cousins. Not even Tajid’s wife. The FSB had taken her into custody and spread the word to Muslim leaders in southern Russia that she wouldn’t be released until Tajid turned himself in. But Tajid was still missing. Either he’d left Russia behind or he was dead. Meanwhile, the other men in the Mayak plant had been questioned, and questioned some more, by the best interrogators the FSB had. At this point, the FSB was satisfied that no one knew anything. And as for the men who must have helped the cousins outside the plant, no one knew anything about them either. No names, no descriptions, no fingerprints, no photographs. They were smoke.

  “What about this component?” Zubrov said. “What could he be talking about? Some kind of detonator? A missile?”

  “A detonator wouldn’t be so expensive and I don’t know why he’d call a missile a component.” Davydenko shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense. They don’t need any additional components to use these bombs. Just the codes. And they don’t have those. I’m not even sure this is related to the theft.”

  “Call Pavlov”—the Rosatom deputy director—“see if he has any ideas.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Thank you, General. Let me know.” Zubrov dismissed Davydenko with a salute. When the general had closed the door, Zubrov ran a hand over his thick jowls. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a drink before noon, but today he wanted one. He wondered if he ought to tell President Medvedev that they should come clean with the United States, acknowledge the theft. But Medvedev would never agree. He wouldn’t accept losing face that way. Not unless he was sure that he had no other choice. And he did have a choice. Rosatom and the generals insisted that the weapons couldn’t be used without the codes. They’d said a dozen times: no codes, no bombs.

  But what if all these fancy green uniforms were wrong? After all, these thieves had gotten into a depot that was supposed to be unbreakable. What if they had some way of cracking the codes? Or getting around them? Then what? Suppose they blew up half of Manhattan, killed a million Americans? And what if the United States linked the weapons to the Russian arsenal? Would the White House demand that Moscow be destroyed in turn?

  The engineers had better be right about their damn bombs, Zubrov thought. They better not have missed anything. Or else the United States and Russia might be headed for a war that would make all the others that had ever happened look like soccer friendlies. Damn the bombs. Damn the engineers, the physicists, and mutually assured destruction. “Damn it all,” Zubrov said to the empty room.

  Zubrov opened the bottom drawer of his big wooden desk, where he kept a bottle of Stoli vodka, a ceremonial gift from the president on his first day as military adviser. He reached down for it, pulled out the bottle and a dusty glass, cleaned the glass with his shirtsleeve and unscrewed the bottle for the first time. Vodka kept forever, another of its many good qualities. He poured himself a healthy shot, though not too healthy. He would have to call Medvedev after this drink. He raised his glass to the empty room, but he couldn’t think of a toast. He drank it down in silence.

  23

  The uranium-235 that Nasiji and Bashir and Yusuf had extracted from the warhead didn’t look like much. A hollow sphere of gray-black metal, cut into jagged slices like an orange rind, the pieces in a plastic box on a workbench. Jumbled among them was a second sphere, solid, not much larger than an oversized grape — the “spark plug” of U-235 that had formed the center of the secondary.

  Nasiji weighed the pieces on a digital scale beside the box, first one by one, then all together. Thirty-two kilos — seventy pounds — in all. Nasiji stared at the scale, a muscle twitching in his jaw, a vein pulsing madly in his forehead.

  “We’ll work it out,” Bashir said. “We’re close.”

  But Nasiji didn’t respond. Until, finally, he put the pieces back into the box and ran his hands through his hair and smiled. His change of mood was as disconcerting as his fury had been. Were you pretending to be crazy then, Bashir wanted to ask, or are you pretending to be sane now? But he supposed he knew the answer. None of them were sane. How could they be? They were building a nuclear bomb. In a stable.

  Is this right? For the first time since he’d gotten i
nvolved in this scheme, that simple question came to Bashir. Was it his place to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, the same Americans he tried to save on the operating table?

  Then he thought of his uncle, in that awful prison at Tora. Egyptians had killed him, but the United States was responsible. The Americans were the puppetmasters all over the Muslim world. Saddam Hussein had been one of their puppets, too. As long as he did what they wanted, fought wars against the Iranians, they didn’t care what he did to his people. But when he stood up to them, they came after him. This place, the United States, had killed millions of Muslims. A bomb like this was the only way to stop them, to even the score. It wouldn’t be pretty, but no war ever was. So Bashir forced the question out of his mind.

  He hoped it wouldn’t come back.

  THE IMAGE PLAYED over and over in Nasiji’s mind, a video he couldn’t turn off: the crate falling out of the lifeboat and sinking into the Atlantic. If only they’d held on to the second bomb. Instead. when he looked at the numbers on the scale, he couldn’t help but feel as though the devil was working to thwart him.

  Again he gathered up the pieces and scattered them on the scale and looked at the black numbers staring at him: 32.002 kilograms. The Russians had been precise, he’d give them that.

  “Thirty-two kilos,” Yusuf said. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s not enough, that’s what it means.”

  “Please, Sayyid,” Yusuf said. “I know you explained before, but if it works for the Russian bomb, why do we need more?”

  “Yusuf—”

  “I’m just trying to understand.”

  “The secondary, the bomb we took apart, the pieces fit together into a globe, right? And when the first bomb, the primary, goes off, the secondary gets smashed together, becomes supercritical”—that word in English.

  “Super-critic-al?” Yusuf sounded like he was auditioning, badly, for a part in Mary Poppins.

  “I told you before. Supercritical means the explosion is speeding up, more and more energy is being released. The Russians, the Americans, they’ve figured out how to smash the material very fast, and that means they need less material to cause an explosion. Ever since the 1940s, we’ve known this is how it works.”

  “But we can’t smash it together as fast as they can.”

  “That’s right. The gun that we’re using, it will shoot the uranium piece at four hundred meters a second”—a quarter-mile a second, nine hundred miles an hour.

  “Isn’t that fast?”

  “Compared to how quickly the fission reaction happens, it’s slow. So we need more uranium, a bigger sphere, to make sure the bomb will go off.”

  “But if it’s so complicated, why don’t we use the Russian bomb?”

  “I should just go back to Iraq, leave this to you.”

  “Sayyid—”

  “I tell you again. The secondary won’t go off without the primary. And the primary, I promise you, it’s been engineered so it won’t go off unless it’s been properly armed. With those famous codes. And we can’t use our own explosive to set it off either. You can’t just paste dynamite around those bombs and push a big handle. The explosive has to be placed and detonated just so, or the bomb won’t go off. We don’t have the equipment. Synchronous detonators and high-grade explosive and a lathe that can cut to the tolerances we need. And even if we could buy them, I don’t know if we have the skill to use them. It would take us six months practicing and testing to be sure. You want to live here for six months, hope no one notices?”

  Nasiji pointed at the recoilless rifles stacked against the wall. “The kind of bomb I want to make, it’s so much easier. Mold the pieces into the right shapes, two masses, both just subcritical, fire one at the other. As long as you have enough material and you fire it fast enough, it’s certain to work. With sixty kilos, it would have been a joke. We could have done it in a week. Now. ”

  “But isn’t there a half way?” Yusuf said. “We have half as much material as we wanted. Can’t we make a bomb half as big?”

  “That’s not how the physics work,” Nasiji said. “Trust me.” Why hadn’t he found a way to detonate the bomb they’d stolen, instead of leaving himself in this mess? Why hadn’t he listened to Bernard and Bashir and sent the bombs to New York on a container ship, instead of being tricky and sending them through Newfoundland? Why hadn’t he made sure that both crates were properly locked down in the lifeboat? He was so stupid. He had failed his father, failed his family, failed his people. His father.

  He felt his anger build again and walked out of the stable and into the cold night air. He leaned against an oak tree and craned back his head and looked through the naked branches at the stars, the ultimate nuclear-power plants.

  Away from the scale’s figures and Yusuf’s questions, his stomach began to unclench. He was being too hard on himself. Thirty-two kilograms was a massive amount of enriched uranium, more than anyone outside a weapons laboratory had ever seen. Little Boy had been sixty-four kilos, but Little Boy had been made from 80 percent enriched uranium — not nearly as pure as the material they had. He hadn’t tested these pieces yet, but they were surely 93.5 percent enriched, standard weapons-grade.

  At that level of purity, even a simple sphere of uranium, with no reflector, no compression, would go critical and produce a nuclear explosion at a size of about fifty kilograms. They were short, but they were in the ballpark.

  Nasiji wondered if Bernard could somehow deliver the beryllium without getting busted. Doubtful. But even without beryllium, they could try a steel reflector. Steel wouldn’t be as effective as beryllium, but it would help. Maybe a double-gun assembly, to achieve maximum acceleration, if Yusuf and Bashir could somehow handle the welding.

  With thirty-two kilograms, putting this bomb together wouldn’t be easy. But it might not be impossible, and he knew the tricks. Slowly, over sixty-five years, first the physics and then the engineering details of building these bombs had leaked out.

  Yusuf emerged from the stable, walked up to him tentatively.

  “Sayyid, I must say this. I’m sorry for my stupid questions. It’s confusing, that’s all.”

  “It’s I who should apologize,” Nasiji said. “My temper—”

  “And I wanted to say, if it’s really impossible with this much, we’ll get more. We’ll leave this here, go back to Russia, find another martyr.”

  Nasiji smiled at the stars. He couldn’t help but admire Yusuf’s attitude, though they couldn’t get within a hundred kilometers of a stockpile now.

  “No need, Yusuf. We’ll make do. I have some ideas.”

  “Is it possible?”

  “God willing. We’ve come too far to quit.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, Nasiji took his physics and engineering textbooks and a sketchpad and Bashir’s laptop and shut himself up in the farmhouse basement beside the Ping-Pong table. Bashir tried to follow, but Nasiji shooed him away.

  “Tell Thalia to leave my lunch at the top of the stairs. Dinner too, most likely.”

  “You don’t want help?”

  “Not for this.”

  “All right, Sayyid. But you’re going to see us anyway.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “There’s no toilet in the basement. Unless you plan to bring down a bucket.”

  At first, Nasiji spent hours sketching out possible ways to set off the plutonium primary inside the Iskander. After all, as Yusuf had pointed out, they already had a bomb. Why not use it? But finally he gave up. He couldn’t figure out a foolproof way to trigger the explosives attached to the bomb, and creating a new trigger, though theoretically possible, would take too long.

  That night he went back to his original plan, the gun-type uranium bomb, the Little Boy design. One piece of enriched uranium was molded into a piece that looked like a length of pipe. A second, smaller piece was shaped into a solid cylinder that fit snugly within the larger piece. Both pieces were subcritical, meaning they were each too small to detonate on their
own.

  The solid cylinder was placed at the end of the gun barrel. Then the pipe-shaped piece was shot at it, creating a single piece that contained a supercritical mass of uranium, big enough to set off a nuclear explosion. The Americans had placed a neutron initiator, a few grams of beryllium and polonium, at the center of the bomb to make sure the detonation happened on schedule. But the initiator wasn’t strictly necessary. The uranium would detonate on its own even without it. As Nasiji had told Yusuf, the great virtue of the design was its simplicity. If the bomb came together quickly enough and had enough uranium, it couldn’t help but go off.

  What Nasiji hadn’t explained to Yusuf was that placing metal around the uranium core would make the explosion happen more efficiently, thus allowing the use of less uranium. The metal was called a reflector, because it bounced the neutrons, causing the chain reaction back at the exploding core. Beryllium was the ideal material for the reflector. A sphere of uranium surrounded by beryllium could produce a nuclear explosion with as little as sixteen kilograms of uranium — a critical mass less than one-third that of an unreflected sphere.

  So, as an insurance policy, Nasiji had asked Bernard six months ago to try to get a cache of beryllium. But Bernard had reported back that the stuff couldn’t be had, not without taking a huge risk, possibly alerting the German authorities. Nasiji had told him to back off, not push too hard. With two warheads, Nasiji figured he would have enough material to make a bomb of his own.

  Now, though, they were short of uranium. Beryllium was the shortest route to making a full-sized bomb. Nasiji had asked Bernard to try again. And only yesterday, in a coded e-mail message, Bernard reported he’d made contact with a man who might be able to provide the stuff. But Nasiji wasn’t at all sure Bernard would come through. In the meantime, they’d have to plan on using a simpler material, something they could pick up in Rochester or Buffalo without attracting too much attention. Tungsten carbide would probably be too much for Bashir to forge. In the end, steel would probably have to do. With that thought, Nasiji spent several hours calculating the optimal thickness of a steel reflector.