Critical Mass

by Steve Martini

  He stepped down into the water, still clinging to the ladder, standing on rungs. With the light, he could see only a few feet out in front of him. Gideon looked down onto the oily surface but couldn’t tell how deep it was. Now the neoprene suit presented a hazard. If he slipped, and fell in over his head, or stepped into an open and flooded hatch, the suit would quickly fill with water. In the dark, without a clear sense of direction, weighted down by the suit, he could quickly drown.

  He stepped down one more rung, still no bottom, then another. On the third step down, he finally hit a flat surface. He was now well above his knees in water. With one hand still clinging to the railing of the ladder, he took a tentative step away. He appeared to be in a narrow companionway that spanned the center of the vessel from bow to stern.

  Gideon took a chance, let go of the ladder, and began sloshing toward the stern, down the short companionway in the direction of the last metallic echo on the hull.

  “Hello.” He listened. The signal of clanging metal was now being repeated as if in desperation, though the rhythm seemed erratic and without energy.

  “Here.” Gideon could hear a voice, weaker than the beam of his own flashlight but still audible.

  “Where are you?” He called back.

  “Here.”

  Gideon took a reading on the Geiger counter. It was well below what he’d received on the forecastle deck; still, time was running out. By now Joselyn should have made the call. He’d been wise to leave her behind. Help was on its way.

  To the right along the companionway was a cabin door.

  “Keep talking so I can find you.” Gideon listened. Nothing.

  He looked with the flashlight as far as he could see down the companionway before the beam disappeared in a film of fumes and darkness.

  “Here.” The voice was breathless but close. It came from farther down the companionway. A few feet farther on was an open door. Gideon peered inside and flashed the light around. It was a small galley, a table that was just above water and a propane stove with two burners. Water sloshed around inside, and remnants of food, some water-logged slices of bread, floated on the surface.

  He headed back down the companionway. Within five feet he came to another door. This one was closed. He tried the handle. The water had swelled the wood in its frame and jammed the door. He put his shoulder into it and heard the wood panel in the center of the door begin to splinter. He hit it again, this time with his full weight. The door buckled and broke. His foot hit the threshold, and Gideon nearly fell through the opening into the water on the other side. Somehow he managed to stay upright and flashed the light inside. He peered through the darkness. In the distance, against the bulkhead on the far wall, was a double bunk bed, upper and lower. The lower bunk was several inches under water.

  As he watched through the flickering beam of light, a form moved under the blanket on the top bunk. Quickly Gideon stepped over the threshold and sloshed his way across the cabin.

  He held up the flashlight and lifted the blanket back. Gideon wasn’t ready for the vision that awaited him. It was only arguably human. The hair was completely gone from the head and lay in tufts like molting fur on the pillow. There was a stench emanating from the bunk that overpowered even the fouled air of diesel fumes. Gideon wanted to put the hood back over his head, but he knew if he did he wouldn’t be able to see.

  The pathetic form on the bed was bleeding from the mouth and nose, dark frothy blood that Gideon knew was coming from deep in the lungs. It formed a pool on the mattress in which the man now rested.

  His eyes looked pleadingly up at Gideon. “Water. Water.” He seemed able to repeat only the one word.

  Gideon was no physician, but it did not require a medical degree to tell that this man would never make it to a hospital. He was dying. Gideon knew he had no more than a few minutes.

  “Who are you?”

  “I need a drink. Water.”

  Gideon looked quickly around the cabin. In one corner was a table, high enough to be above the water. On it was a stainless steel pitcher. He made his way to it around a pillow and small stool floating in the water.

  Suddenly he felt a lurch as the vessel tilted toward the stern, the weight of the engines drawing it down. She was taking on more water. The Dancing Lady was slowly sinking.

  There was no water in the pitcher. Quickly Gideon made his way through seawater that was now creeping up his thigh. He moved from the cabin down the companionway and back to the boat’s galley. The fresh-water tanks should still be watertight, he thought. The question was how he would get water without a functioning pump. He turned the tap and gravity emptied enough water from the pipes into the pitcher to put about three inches in the bottom. It was not much more than a small glass. More than that would probably kill the man in any event.

  Gideon made his way back to the cabin. When the man saw the pitcher of promised water, he expended his last spark of energy, straining toward the pitcher and trying to raise his body.

  “Easy. Easy,” said Gideon. “Slowly.” He knew the man would choke to death if he swallowed too quickly, and there was no more to give him once this was gone. He held the man’s hands down and fed him a few drops of water slowly from the pitcher.

  The man began to hyperventilate and cough.

  Gideon removed the pitcher from his lips just in time to prevent being flooded with a froth of dark venous blood.

  This dripped down the man’s chin, and Gideon wiped it gently with a corner of the blanket.

  “Who are you?” asked Gideon.

  “My name is Jon Nordquist. My boat,” he said. He was breathless. “Water.”

  “In a moment. Where is the device? Is it up forward in the hold?”

  The man used what energy he had to turn his head slowly from side to side only once. “It’s gone.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What happened?” said Gideon.

  “It… ” His voice faded. He regrouped. “It opened. The casing.”

  “The fissile materials were exposed to the air?”

  The man lowered his chin as if to nod. “Yes.”

  “They took it in that condition?”

  “Water.”

  Gideon was now using the pitcher as incentive, trying to keep the man alive long enough to find out what had happened. He gave him a few drops of water.

  The man choked them down and coughed up a little more blood.

  “Did the men who took the device handle the fissile materials inside?” If they had, Gideon knew they would be in the same condition as Nordquist, perhaps a few days less advanced but dying nonetheless. If they were lucky, any plan they had for a bomb might die with them.

  “Did they handle it?” Now Gideon pressed.

  “No. Over the side,” said Nordquist. “My son put it over the side.”

  “Where?”

  “At sea. Broke open on the deck,” said Nordquist. “My boy is dead.”

  It was a cryptic picture, but Gideon understood. Somehow the casing of the Russian artillery shell had broken open. Plutonium, along with the beryllium reflectors inside the bomb, had toppled out onto the deck. Beryllium was a magic metal, lighter than aluminum, stronger than steel, and very expensive. It was prized for its role in inducing critical mass in a nuclear weapon. A beryllium reflector used to surround the plutonium core would reflect neutrons back toward the core, multiplying the chain reaction and hence the power of the bomb.

  They were only fishermen, with no training in the handling of nuclear weapons. Beryllium dust in the lungs was deadly. It resulted in berylliosis, in which the lungs closed down and the victim choked to death. Under the circumstances, the fishermen had the presence of mind to do the only thing they could. They put the nuclear core over the side.

  “Is that why the forecastle is radioactive?”

  “Rolled around,” said Nordquist.

  That explained part of it. The device had probably already started to oxidize in t
he bunker at Sverdlovsk. Once it was free, rolling on the deck, abrading against the rough surface of the wooden deck, it would have left a trail of plutonium dust like a snail’s track. The crew had breathed it in, along with beryllium dust, trying to catch the elusive silvery sphere as it rolled around the pitching deck. But there was something even more deadly present. No amount of salt water or solvent could cleanse the boat, not with the readings that the Geiger counter had detected.

  “More water,” said Nordquist.

  “Was there a second device?” said Gideon.

  “Water.”

  Gideon gave him a little more, and Nordquist lurched into a coughing spasm. For a moment, Gideon thought he would expire. He put one hand behind the man’s back and eased him up so that gravity might help clear his lungs and the blood might run to his stomach. It took several seconds but it worked.

  “Were there two bombs?” asked Gideon.

  The man was breathless, his eyes glazed. Gideon had seen the pallor of Nordquist’s face only once in his life, on a cadaver in a science course in college.

  “You must tell me. Was there a second bomb?”

  Nordquist struggled to breathe, speaking only as he exhaled, between parted and parched lips the word that Gideon dreaded: “Yes … ”

  “Where is it?”

  Nordquist was suddenly silent.

  Gideon moved the pitcher to his lips, but the water merely formed a rivulet down the man’s chin onto his chest. Van Ry studied the man’s open eyes and realized that he was staring from the fixed gaze of death.

  SHE HAD GIVEN him almost twenty minutes. Joselyn couldn’t wait any longer. He had a watch and a flashlight. She had to assume that whatever he found out on those boats was not good, otherwise he would have signaled her from the docks or come back. She was worried that perhaps she had already waited too long.

  She turned and headed for the Dutchman’s van at a run. She skipped over the curb and passed the corner of the port building. The only sensation was the sweep of air an instant before the leaded-leather sap connected with the base of her skull. Joselyn never felt the impact of the concrete as her head hit the sidewalk.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  INBOUND, SAN JUAN ARCHIPELAGO

  Captain William Conners didn’t like it. The orders had not come down through the SOC (Special Operations Command), the normal chain. Instead they had been routed out of Washington, high up in the Pentagon.

  Conners had never seen anything like it before. In his view, it was not only unusual but dangerous. Still, nobody was asking for his views. He wondered who in the chain of command knew what was happening.

  He and the other four men on his team would have no real logistical support. There would be no patrol boats for insertion and extraction. A slow fishing trawler was supposed to pick them up, a vessel that couldn’t move faster than nine knots if it came under fire.

  Conners looked at his watch. The Lockheed C-130 Hercules was five hours into its mission, out of the Naval Air Station in San Diego. Three of his men were asleep in reclining flight chairs, the same kind used on commercial jets, only in this case they were bolted to the floor up front in the cargo bay, down under the ladder leading to the flight deck.

  Another thirty-five minutes and they should be over the drop zone.

  “What’s the weather looking like?” Conners cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted over the roar of the four huge Allison turboprops.

  The flight engineer had just come down the ladder. He was doubling as load master for this trip and getting things ready for the drop.

  He gave Conners a thumbs-up. “Clear. Light winds at the surface. Shouldn’t be any problems.”

  That was easy for the flight crew to say. They didn’t have to jump out into a jet black sky at twenty-thousand feet over open water cold enough to induce hypothermia in a matter of minutes. If his men couldn’t find the inflatables in the dark sea, they would drown, even with tanks and fins and clothed in wet suits. Whoever planned this one had shit for brains, and Conners knew it.

  The so-called HALO (High Altitude-Low Opening) jump was something that might provide great cinematic effect in a James Bond flick. But Navy SEALs who put their bodies on the blocks in combat knew it was insane, especially at night.

  “What are you calling light winds?” said Conners.

  “Five, maybe seven knots,” said the engineer. He was now busy with the gear, unlashing it and getting it near the rear cargo ramp.

  Conners followed him. “Seven knots!”

  “Tops,” said the guy.

  Conners knew that this could be enough to whip up whitecaps on the surface. He checked his tide charts. The northern reaches of Puget Sound could be treacherous. The tidal pull in the narrow channels between the islands could suck a man out into the Pacific quicker than some cruise liners.

  Calculating the tides and currents and the wind drift during free fall, Conners estimated their drop point to be a quarter mile west of Padget Island. If they hit it within half a mile, they would consider themselves lucky.

  The island was a dot of land, a half mile wide by a mile long. There was a single rocky beach on its western shore. The other three sides faced the water with sheer cliffs that would require climbing gear. This was not included in their equipment or their briefing, leaving little margin for error.

  The plan called for using the tidal flood to reach the island. Motors were out; too much noise. Timing was critical. The incoming tide would last for only two more hours. If they missed it and failed to reach the island before the tide turned, the outgoing flood would pull them toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. There would be no way they could paddle fast enough to stay out of its grip. Beyond the strait was the North Pacific, one of the roughest bodies of water in the world. It was not something you wanted to ride in in an open inflatable raft.

  “What’s the drop altitude?” asked the engineer.

  “Seventeen thousand,” said Conners.

  “And your opening?”

  “Three hundred feet.”

  “They couldn’t pay me enough,” said the engineer. He adjusted the altimeter on the large cargo parachutes, so that they would trigger to open at five hundred feet. Deploying at five hundred, the chutes would not open fully for another two hundred feet. If the loads hit the water too hard, it would dislodge the flotation, sending the packages to the bottom, perhaps leaving the men to die in the water.

  In the dark, dropping like bullets through the cloud deck, none of them would know where the rest of the team was. Breathing from their scuba tanks, they would free-fall at speeds approaching 130 miles per hour for more than a minute and a half. At three hundred feet, they would pop their chutes and drop into the sea. They would have just enough time to slow their descent before hitting the water. They would be visible in the air for less than ten seconds. The plan was intended to minimize the chances of detection by sentries on the island. It also increased greatly the team’s risk factor. Night drops into the sea often met with casualties. Usually these were the result of accidents rather than combat.

  The cavernous cargo bay was nearly empty, except for the two small pallets containing the inflatables and the listening gear along with cameras to be planted on the island. There were small arms, automatic weapons, and supplies of ammunition in the event of trouble, though Conners had been briefed. He knew that in a firefight they would be outgunned. The men on the island had fifty-caliber weapons. It wasn’t known whether they were full automatic.

  The pallets were dragged to their position near the rear ramp. The men themselves would jump from one of the two doors on either side of the aircraft behind the landing-gear fairings.

  With eight minutes and counting, Conners got his men up and started final checks on their gear, the regulators on their tanks, the seals around their face masks.

  At six minutes, the warning light on the cargo bay bulkhead went on and the flight engineer donned his face mask for oxygen. The team would breathe from their compressed-air diving t
anks.

  Conners tapped the altimeter on his wrist and checked his compass.

  At three minutes, the whine of hydraulic motors kicked in and a yawning ramp at the rear of the plane opened. As the shape and control surfaces of the giant C-130 changed, it began to buffet, porpoising through the thin, high atmosphere.

  The flight engineer opened one of the side doors and removed it. Now the rush of wind filled the cargo bay. Conners lined his men up at the door. Then the green light. One by one, they jumped from the door, falling like stones through the cold night air.

  Conners was the last. He felt the cut of air like a dozen knives as it hit the flesh of his face and forehead between the diving mask and the hood of his wet suit. He tried to breathe normally from the mouthpiece as his body experienced the giddy weightlessness of free fall. In the dark, with no point of reference, it was easy to relax, to go too far and blow past the safety point. If it happened, the jumper would never know it. Hitting the water at more than a hundred miles an hour, the human body would explode like a water balloon hitting concrete.

  Conners kept a tight eye on his altimeter. He heard the pop of a chute, like a rifle shot, as he flew past and continued to drop. If his altimeter was working, they were at two thousand feet. They hadn’t hit the water, and already there was a problem. He wondered if it was one of his men or one of the giant cargo chutes.

  He dropped through the cloud deck, and suddenly there were lights. In the distance he could see the glitter of a small town spread out in front of him. He checked his compass. He was facing east. He bent his knees and dropped his torso, spinning his body half a turn. Now he was facing Padget Island. All he could see below was the darkness of the sea. Off in the distance were the lights of a large refinery. That would be ARCO. It was a marker for the pilot.

  Six hundred feet. He put his hand on the rip cord. Three seconds later he pulled it. The black Jedi Knight chute exploded above his head, jerking his body to a stop like a rag doll. The delta canopy overhead, with its steering shroud lines, allowed him to maneuver, if only for a matter of seconds. Conners used the time to orient himself toward the island. He was looking at his compass, then suddenly saw the fluorescence of the sea an instant before he hit the water.