Critical Mass

by Steve Martini

  “And I suppose if I tell you what I know you’re going to let me go?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “But there are many ways to die,” said Belden. “Some of them are actually quite painless.”

  “I’m sure you’d be the expert on that,” said Joselyn. “So what are you saying? You’re going to let me pick my own poison?”

  “If you like.”

  “Fine. I want to die in a plane crash by remote control.”

  Belden laughed. “Ah, if we’d only met under other circumstances. Another time, another place.”

  “But you’ve got such a busy schedule, moving all those bombs.”

  Belden looked at her. For the first time the smile was gone.

  “Who told you that?”

  Joselyn didn’t answer.

  “Your tall friend?”

  She just looked at him.

  “Or was it the federal prosecutor?” He leaned on the bed with one hand.

  “Tell me.” His voice lifted a little at the end.

  While Joselyn was still looking at his face, the back of his hand caught her full force on the cheek snapping her head to the left. The pain exploded like a star burst. For an instant, Joselyn thought she might pass out. She tasted the salty tang of blood inside her mouth and tried to focus her eyes.

  Now he was smiling again. “You can tell me. After all, you are my lawyer,” said Belden. “We really shouldn’t have any secrets.”

  She could tell he was starting to get off on it. Fire was forming in his eyes. Hitting women was something he enjoyed.

  “After all, I did pay you a fee,” said Belden. “Maybe it wasn’t enough?” He caught her with the hand coming back the other way, and the pain in her head ratcheted up one more notch.

  “Don’t we have some kind of confidence or something here? Maybe I should file a complaint with the bar,” said Belden. “My lawyer won’t tell me what’s going on.”

  He reached over like he was getting ready to smack her one more time when the door opened. Joselyn looked through glazed eyes at the man standing in the open doorway. She could feel blood running down her chin from the corner of her lip.

  The man in the doorway was small, with soft brown eyes and dark thinning hair. He was carrying a suitcase and dressed in a sport coat and slacks, like he was ready to travel. For an instant, his eyes met Joselyn’s. There was something in his expression that provided a sense of sanctuary, as if suddenly something human had entered the room. It was an expression of compassion. It was quickly coupled with regret.

  Belden stopped in mid-slap and dropped his arm. “Ah. Mr… .” He almost said the name but then stopped. “I’d like you to meet my lawyer, Ms. Cole. We were just having a frank exchange of views.”

  “It’s time to go.” The man did not acknowledge her presence but broke eye contact and turned away. At that moment, Joselyn knew she was dead.

  Belden picked up the items from the bedside table, all but one. The business card he left, dog-eared and frayed, and replaced the rest of the items in his pocket.

  “I wish it could have been longer,” said Belden. “But all good things must come to an end.”

  “Until the next time,” said Joselyn. Blood trickled down her cheek and fire filled her eyes. If he’d given her an opening, Belden would have been sporting permanent scars and speaking with a much higher voice. She might have paid the price, but he would have known he’d been in a fight.

  “Unfortunately not,” said Belden. He took one last look at her, crossed the room in three strides, closed the door, and was gone.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  PADGET ISLAND, WA

  Conners could no longer feel the tips of his fingers. They were numb from the fifty-degree water. The three men struggled with the inflatable raft, pulling it up onto the rock-strewn beach. In the dark, with no clear landmarks, Conners couldn’t even be sure if in fact they had landed on Padget Island. He looked for landmarks. A jagged rock cliff on the left seemed right. The swale cut by a small creek that drained on the beach matched the map he’d studied on the plane.

  The beach was nothing like the sandy dunes around San Diego where they trained. The three men slogged up to their knees through the mud of a tidal flat, their feet slipping on moss-covered boulders and slick seaweed. They struggled to pull the raft with its floating pallet of equipment above the incoming tide line.

  Conners huddled with the other two men in the lee of a large boulder and scanned the beach with night goggles for any sign of thermal images.

  “You think Scofield and Reams made it?” One of the others looked at Conners. The kid was no more than nineteen years old. His first time in anything approaching combat, and he was scared.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Shouldn’t we look for ‘em?”

  “Break open the gear,” said Conners. “Get me the radio.”

  They took their gun-metal diving knives to the black neoprene cover over the pallet, sliced it neatly, and popped the lid off of one of the metal containers inside. Within a few seconds, they found the small handheld radio set. It had a range of only about a mile, but it used secure low-range frequencies.

  Conners took it and checked the power switch, then hit the transmit button and held it down. “Gopher, this is Gopher One. Do you read?”

  He let the button up. All they heard was static. He turned the squelch dial up to kill the sound, so sentries in the bunker on the bluffs wouldn’t hear the noise.

  “Gopher, this is Gopher One. Come in. Do you read?”

  More static.

  “Maybe we should check the beach for them. Maybe they got separated from the pallet and lost the radio.”

  “We don’t have time,” said Conners. “If they’re on the island, they’ll find us.”

  “If we stay here, the people up there are gonna find us real quick.” The third SEAL was older, more experienced than either Conners or the other man. He had seen action in Panama and the Gulf. He knew what Conners suspected; a night dive over pitch-black water, you could expect fifty-percent casualties to be delivered by the forces of nature, tides, weather, and the sea.

  “Right now, we’ve got to find that sentry post up on the bluff,” said Conners.

  “But Richie and Jason … ”

  “Richie and Jason knew what they were doing,” said Conners. “We can’t help ‘em, and we can’t go looking for them. Do you understand?”

  The kid didn’t like it, but he understood.

  “According to the map, the militia has a fifty-caliber gun mounted in a bunker somewhere up here in these trees.” The three men looked for landmarks that offered some clue as to the location.

  Normally SEALs would take any sentries out, either with a silenced round or a knife. But the rules of engagement in this case made that impossible. They were to fire only in self-defense. The mission was classified as an “operation other than war,” an event that if it went right, would never be reported. Their job was to get in, plant their equipment—miniature cameras and listening devices along with a small microwave transmitter—and then get out, and to do all of it undetected.

  They opened the watertight arms container from the pallet and removed the small arms. Each pallet contained six weapons, two M-16s, and M-14 for distance and penetrating power, an MP-5 submachine gun, and two handguns—nine-millimeter Berettas, each with a silencer. If they had to shoot, the plan was one shot, one kill. They would aim for the high chest or forehead. Unlike the movies where emptying a full clip in a single burst made for action, the SEALs had limits. Ammunition was heavy. Pulling too much of it behind you on a pallet in the open water was like dragging a sea anchor. Unless they got into a full-out firefight, three-round bursts were the limit.

  There had been one M-60 light machine gun included with their equipment. Along with the loss of two of his men, Conners now discovered that the M-60 was missing.

  “It musta been on the other pallet.”

  “Check
the electronic gear,” said Conners.

  One of the SEALs popped the metal lid off the other container, while Conners and the other man checked the ammunition. Quietly they slipped loaded clips into the receivers and pulled the bolts back, chambering rounds.

  Each man took a rifle. Conners took the MP-5 and tucked one of the Berettas into a pack.

  Into the pack, they loaded five small microphones along with miniature cameras, each with a fish-eye lens that would allow wide-angle shots at short distance.

  Into a separate pack they loaded a base-station transmitter, a small metal box weighing fourteen pounds with its own collapsible dish. This would be placed at a high remote point on the island, facing the southwestern horizon. It would transmit both audio and video signals on a special subsonic frequency to a satellite in space. In turn, this would be relayed to the naval base in Everett, forty miles south, where agents of the FBI and Military Intelligence would monitor the signals.

  “Check the batteries,” said Conners.

  The SEAL flipped a switch on the transmitter and watched as the tiny pinhead lamps flashed on. “It’s good.”

  They cut the line tethering the equipment pallet to the inflatable raft, then punched holes in its rubber flotation wings with their knives. They stripped the flotation off the pallet and buried it in some loose gravel under a rock. Anyone finding the pallet would think it was mere flotsam, washed up on the beach.

  Then the three men muscled the inflatable raft along with their air tanks and diving gear farther up the beach. They hid the raft and tanks under some brush and cut a few low boughs from the trees to cover it all.

  They smeared their faces and the backs of their hands with jungle-green and black-sand-colored grease paint to repair the camouflage that had washed off in the water.

  Conners checked his watch. They had less than two hours before the first rays of dawn crept over the mountains to the east. Using hand signals, he directed the man with the M-14 and the other silenced pistol to take point. The three of them began to scale the high bank toward the bluff.

  WASHINGTON, DC

  Sy Hirshberg was camped in the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing. He had been there all night, waiting for word from the naval base in Everett. It was now after seven in the morning on the east coast, and Hirshberg was worried.

  “What are we hearing?”

  Hirshberg turned and saw the president as he entered the room.

  “Nothing. Not a word since the plane left the drop point last night.”

  “It’s still early,” said the president.

  Hirshberg looked at his watch. “We should have had radio communications by now.”

  “You think something went wrong?”

  “It’s possible. I think we should have provided some contingency plans,” said Hirshberg. “If those men get in trouble… ”

  “They’ll be all right. The SEALs are the best,” said the president. “I don’t want to overreact. You remember what happened at Waco. We don’t want a repeat.”

  Hirshberg didn’t like it. The SEALs were under-gunned, out-manned, with no backup or fast boats to extricate them if trouble developed.

  “I think we made the right decision,” said the president.

  Hirshberg grated in silence at the use of the plural pronoun. “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I have to disagree. I think we should have sent in troops.”

  “More troops just draw more attention. We’d need a staging area.”

  Hirshberg knew the president well enough to know what he was really afraid of. The media would pick up on it.

  “No. I’m satisfied that this is the right way to go about it,” said the president.

  “And if it fails, we will have lost any element of surprise,” said Hirshberg. “If they have a device and if it’s ready to detonate, what then?”

  This actually stopped the president for a moment as he considered the consequences. “If it must be, better there than some major population center.”

  Hirshberg couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The expression on his face betrayed his thoughts.

  “Listen, Sy, I’m not at all convinced there’s anything to this. You want my personal view—I think we’re all running around chasing our tails. I don’t think there is a device. I don’t think there ever was one.”

  “What about the debris from the Russian trawler?”

  “Yes, well, who knows where that came from. Maybe they used the ship to refuel some of their subs at sea. You know the Russians. They’re not exactly careful the way they handle and transport the stuff. Stone-age safety systems. Remember Chernobyl?”

  “Can we afford to take the chance, Mr. President?”

  “That’s why we’re sending in the SEALs. To check it out.”

  Hirshberg knew what the president was afraid of. If he sent in forces he would have to explain why, the nature of the threat. This would be followed by a lot of questions from the press and Congress that would inevitably lead to Kolikoff and his corporation, questions the president would rather not get into.

  If anything went wrong, Hirshberg suspected that the White House was already prepared with the usual litany of lies for the public and the press. A tragic accident had occurred on the island during a training exercise. The president knew nothing about it but was getting the facts. He would be calling the next of kin to commiserate with them. He and the first lady would be flying west to meet with the families in San Diego. It wouldn’t be the first time some screwed-up covert ops got passed off as a wayward training exercise.

  The question in Hirshberg’s mind was what the president would do then. Would he agree to throw a ten-mile cordon around Padget Island and send in troops, or would he continue to deny until a mushroom-shaped cloud formed somewhere in the sky over the Northwest?

  “Mr. President, we have to assume that if the people on that island have a bomb, they will use it. We may only have one chance to stop them and that’s to act now, swiftly and with maximum force to seize the device before they know what hits them.”

  “If the people on that island have a bomb, my first objective is to isolate it. Keep it where it is. Bottle ‘em up, and then talk ‘em to death,” said the president.

  “Negotiate with terrorists?” said Hirshberg.

  “I didn’t say negotiate. I said talk, until we wear them down.”

  “And what if we don’t wear them down? What if they decide to push the button?”

  There was a long, deep sigh from the President. “We’re not talking New York or Boston or even L.A.,” he said. “We will have confined the damage maybe to a single island.”

  “That assumes the bomb is on the island.”

  “That’s why we sent in the SEALs, to find out. Now let’s not argue about this anymore. I’ve made the decision.” The president wandered to a side table where there were some Danish pastries and a pot of coffee. He poured a cup and picked through the pastries. “What is this—can’t we get anything hot?” He looked at the Marine aide who immediately took his order, bacon and eggs with toast.

  “Sy, you want anything?”

  “No, Mr. President.” Hirshberg had lost his appetite. He was beginning to envy the litany of aides who had bailed out on the administration as it neared the end of its first term.

  “Something coming in, sir.” One of the communications staff was talking to the officer in charge, a Marine lieutenant.

  Hirshberg got out of his chair and practically flew to the area over the soldier’s shoulder, looking at the computer screen.

  “Is it from Everett?” The president put a half-eaten pastry down on the side table as he chewed and swallowed.

  “No, sir.”

  He went back to his pastry.

  “I think you better see this, Mr. President.” Hirshberg was reading the screen.

  The president grabbed his coffee and walked over toward the computer station.

  There on the screen was a communiqué. It was not from the naval base at Everett,
but from the Department of Energy, marked

  TOP SECRET, RD (Restricted Data) URGENT!

  CIVILIAN SOURCES CONNECTED WITH THE INSTITUTE AGAINST MASS DESTRUCTION (SANTA CRISTA, CA) REPORT EXISTENCE OF HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE DEBRIS ON VESSEL, LOCATED FRIDAY HARBOR, SAN JUAN ISLANDS. CONTAMINATION BELIEVED RELATED TO NUCLEAR DEVICE. REQUESTING DISPATCH OF NEST.

  The acronym referred to one of four Nuclear Emergency Search Teams. Their role, though they had never been called up in an actual event, was to respond to nuclear emergencies, including terrorist devices brought into the country. The teams had conducted mock emergency exercises in the early 1990s with less than satisfactory results.

  “Did they find a bomb?” asked the president.

  “Sir, it doesn’t say. Only that they believe the contamination is related to a nuclear device.” The young lieutenant at the monitor looked back over his shoulder at the president.

  “Well, get some clarification. Call somebody at DOE.” The president’s words sent the military aides in the room scrambling.

  “Mr. President, we can’t afford to wait.”

  “What?” The president looked at Hirshberg.

  “It’s no coincidence, sir. The militia on that island. The discovery of radioactive debris on a vessel.”

  The president looked at a map of Puget Sound that was already projected on a large screen on the wall. Padget Island was circled by a slow flashing ring of light, indicating the area of operations by the SEAL team. Hirshberg grabbed a laser pointer from a podium below the map and hit Friday Harbor with a red arrow.

  “It’s less than twelve miles.”

  Even in a state of denial, the president could no longer avoid the obvious.

  “There’s a small force of Marines at Everett. They can be airborne in choppers in less than a hour.” Hirshberg had done his homework. He had, through the Joint Chiefs, put the Marines on alert.

  “Cordon off Friday Harbor,” said Hirshberg. “Hit Padget Island with everything we’ve got and hope we find the device.”

  “We should wait for confirmation,” said the president. “What do we know about this institute, this place in California?”